The Herd with Colin Cowherd - The Favorites - The "Toughest" Part of Betting

Episode Date: August 10, 2022

Today's guest is Steve Magness, a performance expert, coach and author of the new book "Do Hard Things."  He's coached some of the top distance runners in the world, and literally wrote the book on the subject. But his newest book asks its readers to re-think how they perceive the prevailing model of toughness and its mentality of fear, false bravado, and hiding weakness.  Sports betting is famously an environment filled with false bravado and weakness hiding as strength. It is a pursuit loaded with mental pitfalls some never overcome. That's why Action Network hosts Chad Millman and Simon Hunter dig deep with Steve to learn the lessons in his book, and draw parallels between mentally coaching yourself to outcomes and the sometimes nauseating pursuit of sports betting success.  As Steve writes, “real toughness is experiencing discomfort or distress, leaning in, paying attention, and creating space to take thoughtful action. It’s navigating discomfort to make the best decision you can.”  #HerdSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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I am Shad Milman, Chief Content Officer of the... the Action Network. I am joined, as always, by my BFF, my companion, my compadre, professional better from the fighting city of Philadelphia, South Jersey's finest. Simon Hunter. How did I not ask you about your vacation? I took a couple of people who reached out to me, said, how did you not ask Chad about Italy? So real quick, what was Italy like, brother?

Simon, let me tell you something. I don't expect. anybody to ask me questions about myself. That is the burden I've placed on myself as a leader. All I can do is show interest in the people that I work with, care about them as deeply as I can. And if I don't get it back, it's fine. I don't take it personally. It doesn't matter. My job is to make sure that everybody that I work with is lifted up. So I'm not offended by it. Chad Milman is proud of himself. Italy was so shamefully, obnoxiously excellent.

I almost hesitate to talk about it in a public forum. Because the rest of us are never going to go there. So you don't want to rub it in our faces, but I get it. I don't know that you'll go there and do it the way that I did it. No. You know, being the mogul that I am. Yeah, probably not going to sell a company worth 240 million. So I'm probably not going to do Italy like you did.

It was truly extraordinary. I will say this, that we got very lucky. There were nine of us. It was me and my wife and our two boys and my sister and her husband and their three kids. It's amazing to go away. You're lucky if you can get to go away. It was amazing to experience a lot of things in Italy. The Coliseum, which I sent you and Mitchell a picture of.

It was spectacular. My wife described it yesterday to a friend. It was just a special, wonderful trip. we're lucky to have done it. You'd recommend it, though. So someone to ask you, should I spend a bunch of money go to Italy? You'd say, yeah.

100%. All right. Noted. Simon, one of the hardest things about coming back is mentally transitioning. One of the hardest things about being a professional better, being a better generally, is mentally fighting through the mock.

You and I talk about this all last year. We will be influenced by what we see. we will be influenced by what we hear. Last year it probably took us four or five weeks to get into a zone where we got out of the trash and just started focusing on what we know is right and staying true to that course no matter what because we understand like how we can be at our best. There is nobody, nobody who is a better expert at understanding performance, the mental aspects of performance than our guest today.

If you listen to the show, you're probably a sports better and whether you do it recreationally or professionally. As I said, it's no secret that sports betting can be one of the toughest most mentally exhausting activities around. Simon, we brought in an expert who's exploring the science behind toughness. And by the way, this timing couldn't be better because we're getting into the point where we're all going to have to start making hard decisions as better. Today's guest, Steve Magnus is a performance expert and author as well as the coach who's some of the top distant runners in the world, literally writing the book on the subject, the science are running. But today he's got a new book, folks. We'll be talking to him about that book, Do Hard Things. It reexamines how we perceive the traditional model of toughness and its mentality of fear, false bravado, hiding weaknesses.

in the sports betting world, we see plenty of this. Steve, you are going to have a captive audience today. And as someone who is an avid pelotoner, roer, exerciser, I'm going to have a lot of questions. Welcome. Oh, thanks so much for having me. I'm so thrilled to be here, especially after your Italy vacation. I'm now jealous as well as thrilled to be here.

Well, you know, listen, you're a bestselling author. I'm sure you can find a way to get there. You know, I've been to Italy once, but it was unfortunately to watch a track meet that I had people competing at. And I had like three hours to tour all of Rome. So I may or may not have snuck into the Coliseum instead of waiting on all those lines. But in those three hours, it was a great place. The Coliseum is a good transition to what we're talking about because it was sort of, you know, spectacle to perform in the Coliseum. I mean, everything in the Coliseum basically ended in death.

It would be a day of death. But the idea of sport, the idea of being mentally tough, you are an expert on this. So before we even get into how you become an expert or what you tell people or how people fight through it, give me a time recently when you have. haven't been mentally tough and you had to fight your way out of it. Oh, man, that's a good question. So I'll give it in that actually the exercise realm because at one point I was a really good athlete. But as often happens with most of us, as we get older and a job and family and real life,

our fitness starts to decline. And recently I'd been through a bout of like injuries and then just, I'll just say it. It's been like 100 degrees in my hometown of Houston, Texas, so it's miserable to be outside. So I haven't been exercising as much. So, you know, I was like, all right, I'm going to get back on it. I go out first day after coming back, not in the best shape, but still have that mentality as if I am. So I go out for a run as if I am, you know, my younger, in shape, fast self. And it was miserable.

And I quit. I was like, this sucks. And for me as an athlete, that's like, you know, it's, it's an anathema to who I am. But it just shows you that like that mental muscle to handle difficult things, it is a skill that we can develop and that will also decrease and go away if we don't flex that muscle enough, even in those of us who have like a lifetime experience of it. God, that's so interesting that you say that because I'm not saying it to sound like a jerk. I will exercise a lot, went to Italy for two weeks, actually worked out in the gym in the hotel, went running a couple times outside, even though it was close to 100 degrees, even at like 8 in the morning. But I came back and like mentally could not get myself into it in my workouts since I got back had been terrible. like shorter, not as high performance, not as hard, and like mentally cannot break through.

I think part of it because I just wasn't performing at sort of the same level and intervals and intensity as I was before. How do you retrain yourself? How do you get your mind to be exercising as a muscle like that? Yeah. So a lot of it is being in that experience and then being, able to like sit with it experience and then navigate through it because you have to look at it this way. Our brain is a protective machine. So the reason it tells you, hey, don't go out and

exercise, don't do that is because it's something that is outside of your norm. It's the same experience when maybe you know, you're making a risky bet or like thinking about it. Your brain is sitting there like, don't do this. Don't take this risk. Why? Because it's it wants to be safe and comfortable. So that anything that stretches that, you know, that safety or comfort or pushes us out of that zone, our kind of security mind comes on and sounds that alarm and tells us to, like, freak out, stop escape. The way that we get used to it again is often not to like, hey, I'm just going to like ignore that push through it, but to realize and recognize, okay, why is this happening in this moment? So for you, coming back from Italy, it's a great thing. all that good stuff. You just said your intensity, your intervals were a little bit worse, right? Well, what does that send? That sends a message that, oh, this isn't worth it anymore. We're not making progress. Like, we're not getting better. We are motivated when we think we are getting better. When we don't have a shot or we feel like we're going the wrong way or we're losing

and our bets or whatever have you, that motivation is going to plummet. So you have to kind of figure, out, okay, how do I reframe things and get myself back in the state where I see progress, where maybe I'm not at my best self, but I can start where I am and say, okay, you know, maybe a month ago I was doing X, but let's forget about that and let's focus on where I am now and figure out how to get that motivation back by giving yourself a path and route towards progress. One more question before I let Simon jump in. As an athlete, what made you have the confidence to say, wait a second, I feel like I can be an expert in telling people how to be mentally stronger. So I think that took a very long time. And I think it was honestly from my own

struggles in the places where I didn't succeed. So briefly, I'll give you an example is, as I said, I was a really good athlete in high school. I ran a mile and four minutes and one second, which was just shy of that four-minute barrier and the fastest high schooler in the nation at that point. So in my mind, I saw like, oh, I'm going to like go to the Olympics, do all this crazy stuff. Well, I never got better. So part of that pushed me towards evaluating why that happened and why I couldn't get through this, this kind of moment or breakthrough that I'd so desperately wanted. And that pushed me down this search to be like, okay, well, lot of that is the psychological game. It's that mental muscle we're talking about. So a lot of it,

like, where do you get that confidence from being able to tell people how to get stronger, tougher, whatever it is? A lot of it comes from my own failings and my own struggle in that situation to figure out, okay, what would I do differently? If I was, you know, whatever, 18-year-old, Steve, how could I now handle this situation to be able to get on the other side of it instead of being stuck in that that that barrier i think you touch it a little bit like something that i attribute a lot to sports like i learned very young that losing is a part of life right if you don't play sports you're not really losing a lot in life right like unless you're playing video games against other people but i do think it's good that one of the best parts of sports is losing and learning

early on that if you want to win you want to do better you literally just have to put the work in And I've carried that over to sports betting where my job is bouncing back from losing. Like, I'm going to lose and I'm going to lose a lot of money. And it's like one of these stressors where that's probably the hardest part of my job. I tell people all the time, you can build a model. Anyone in the world can go online, find a model, build it. In no world does that make you a sports better because there's just so many other pillars that go into it. And one of them is money management.

And how do you affect after losses? is like, I could tell you every loss I've ever had. I can't tell you about every win, right? It's just like human nature, right? We remember survival instincts. Remember the loss is not so much to wins. And I would just love to hear a perspective of a guy that, you know, you've been around sports. You get how everything's kind of a marathon.

It's not a sprint. What is your view on sports betting, how guys can use that in that field where it's like, you're going to lose. That's just part of life and part of sports betting. Yeah, so I'm so glad you brought this up because I think it in the U.S. often what happens is we learn how to lose very poorly, which is we almost linger on it and think that we should, you know, feel like it's the end of the world and like really experience that emotion. You see this with like football coaches all the time where they're just like,

you should despise losing. And I get it. Losing isn't fun. But if we constantly ingrain that negative view of losing, what it does is it puts us in a fear in an avoidance state. So if I sit there and I'm like, you know, I make a bet and I lose a lot, if I linger in it, all I'm doing is training my brain to say, this state really sucks. I should do everything possible to avoid it, which isn't the place to perform out. You want to perform out of what we'd call approaching or like, you know, being proactive and playing to win versus playing not to lose. And actually there's some fascinating research in the sports world that shows that, for example, after a tough law, There was a study on professional rugby players, some of the toughest guys ever, that showed that, you know, if a coach just like kept berating them after a loss and said, hey, this is where you messed up, this is how you screwed up. Like, look at this game film and see everything you did wrong right afterwards. What happened is they experienced this stress response. They experienced a high level of stress hormone cortisol. And then what happens is a week later in their next game, those.

who went through that tough loss and had their coaches berating them, they were stressed more before the next game and they played worse. On the flip side, the players who said, hey, that loss sucked. The coaches are like, that loss sucks. Here's what we can learn from it. But let's move on. Before the next game that week later, they had an increase in testosterone, a positive stress hormone.

And they were able to like have confidence and take on that game. they played better. So often, like, how we handle those losses impacts us not just in that moment, but it impacts how we're going to bounce back and be ready to do the thing again. What do you do if you're like Simon, if you're a better, you're going through a season, you're not going to have that, that sort of external motivation or demotivator. It's all got to be internal. what are the hard things that you need to sort of steal yourself for when you're the only machine that's powering it? It's like a marathon, right?

Like you're not going to have someone yelling at you in the middle of a race. How do you get through 26.2 miles? How do you get through a 17-week NFL season with internally having to get through hard things? Yeah, it's incredibly difficult. And I think one of the things, especially when it's, you know, I almost started. equate betting to like individual sports where you don't have that support group around you, where it's just kind of you alone in your head and you're trying to navigate that. And that makes it 10x, you know, more difficult. And one of the reasons is because what happens is we essentially

internalize everything. So it's not just that, oh, I lost this bet or I wasn't successful betting on this game. Your brain almost internalizes it as like, I am a loser. Like, it is my character that is, like, at fault here. We're in games, team games, like, you can blame it on someone else. You can, like, you have this external that you can say, oh, it's the coach, it was the ref, it was someone else's. In betting, when it's just you making those bets, you can't do that.

So a couple of things that really helped getting through that is almost creating your own, like, support and structure to make it where you realize that, like, betting is the thing that you do and it's really important, but it is not your soul defining, like, reason and being on this world. There are other aspects or other parts of your life that, like, you can get meaning and value and whatever have you. I'm not saying make it less important. I'm just saying, like, have some diversity of, like, sources of meaning to go to. And then the other thing that I think is really important is having a clarity, having clarity on, like, the purpose and what betting brings to the table. Because like success and failure can pull us

towards like, you know, almost being a little delusional on those external things. And we need to have reminders of like, well, why do I choose to do this? Why do I choose to go through this, you know, 17 game season that can cause me to go a little bit crazy? Having those reminders that like center you allows you to get through that, that, that, that, that, marathon without, you know, having your motivation completely go haywire. You mentioned something really interesting before that if you're only doing something to improve performance, it can be demotivating. And I think that gamblers can teach us a lot about decision making, the way they approach bets, the way they approach managing consequences.

and making decisions when a lot of money is at stake, when risk. And then how gamblers tend to sleep relatively well, win or lose, because they've gone through a process that allows them to feel comfortable with the decision. And that process will allow them to make the same decision the next time if all those circumstances are lining up. What's interesting to me is that, and I don't know how you translate this to high-performance athletes, but the best betters in the world, Simon, is one of them. if they're winning 5.3 times out of 10, they're superheroes, which isn't very good.

Like in the grand scheme of things, you want to perform at 70%, 80%. But is that reality for anybody? Yeah. What I would translate this to sport is actually you see the best athletes are almost like hyper real on embracing the reality of the situation. they experience. So we often think that athletes are like the best athletes are like the ones who are like super overconfident and like have all this bravado and all that stuff. But what the research actually shows and what the experience of best athletes shows that they can like distinguish like

the task that they have at hand versus their ability to handle that or their capabilities and they match that up and align that very, you know, concretely. And I think that's what you're getting at here is that with gamblers and betters, it's not, hey, I need to think that I need to, you know, win every bet. It's being realistic on the sense that if I win, you know, 5.3 out of 10 times, that's realistic. And that sets you up more for success and maybe not having that like negative emotional arousal where you think like, oh, I should win all the time or I, which should win most of the time because that negative stress and arousal can get in the way of your decision making.

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Yeah, I talk on here all the time. about like I'm human as much as I want to come on here and be like I'm living the dream like I try not to rub it on people's faces on here but I'm literally a guy in my early 30s no wife for kids tons of money worked really hard in the industry now it's like you know it's stressful but the stressful days are kind of behind me a little bit where like yeah I'm stressing about football but am I hungry am I like worried about health insurance like all that stuff no so I think what you said is good about perspective where it's like I hate sometimes doing this show chat i'm not going to lie to you like there's sometimes where i'll lose

big money and i got to come on this podcast and talk about losing that big money and it's like literally like reopening up a wound right like i've already done the surgery basically my rule is i can drink i can smoke do whatever sunday night monday morning it's a new week right i dive into the new data it's a new week for football but then i come on the show it's say we do it on on tuesday and it's like i got to relive a horror so i would say that was probably something i did adjust to where as a normal better, that's, that's not normal. Like, you just, you, you would never talk about, again, being killed on a Sunday and you have to re-talk about it on Tuesday where it's like, that's part of the gig. So I would love to hear a perspective of the failure. Because to me,

that's just such an important thing in life for people, like you said about, I think that's an American thing, the failure thing where it's like, I love failing. Like, I just, I have all these memories of my life of these risks I've taken and have how I've failed. And it was like, who cares? Like, like literally I tell people a time about, talking to girls. If she says no to you, like if you go up to ask a girl, buy a drink or even talk to her. She says no. Who cares? It's literally you just took 10 seconds your life. You already know the answer. It's on. You move to the next one. And that's just my perspective of sports betting where it's like it hurts, man. Like losing a lot of money on a stupid football game,

it really hurts. But just like you talk about these sports athletes, I'm kind of bred for it. Like I think one of my things I'm like, I'm best out, I've had something weird in my brain where it's like, I am unfazed by it. Like, I just know you put the work in, the winning comes. And I feel like you just talked about that with athletes. Like, they have the same way of thinking. Yeah. No, you're probably wired in the same way that elite athletes are.

And actually, there's some fascinating work on neuroscience in the brain that shows how this occurs, which essentially we have, think of it as we have this like sensitivity of an alarm. And for some people, it's like they fail. And it's like the alarm goes off and it's like life or death. my life is over. For other people, it's like a blip where it's like, yeah, this sucks. I'm experiencing this, but like that blip is going to get turned down. And I'm guessing if like we could look in your brain, that's how your brain is, Simon, like you have done that. And what's interesting is you just

got out there is, okay, people hear that and they're like, oh, am I born with that or not? Well, the research is again clear is like, yeah, some people are better at it than others, but we all can train to improve that that kind of alarm sensitivity. How do you do that? Two main things is, and you just describe this, you inoculate yourself. If you put yourself in situations that like make that alarm kind of go off where you're a little uncertain, then realize, okay, what's the big deal? Like I went, I went and talked to that girl, got rejected. Like, is my life over? No, I'm just moving on to the next thing. the more you do things like that in your life, like the more that tells your brain that, hey, I'm okay with failure. And the other thing that is really important here is also your

mindset and approach, which we can all control. And there was some wonderful research in the world of special forces and Navy, Navy SEALs that found that they tend to have a stress is enhancing or like failure is positive mindset because they realize, oh, yeah, this is a, going to be really difficult, but this is also where the growth comes from. If I fail, I often learn something about myself that I don't learn when I succeed it. So it can be this positive. And they found that, again, most of the Navy SEALs have this just subtle mindset shift that other people often don't. So to me, it's pretty simple. It's like, put yourself in the right mindset and then allow yourself to explore and take risks and fail. And sometimes that means,

it's like starting with really simple things before you jump to the big thing. What's a simple thing? I mean, it could be as simple as, you know, the example Simon said there is like, you know, are you scared to talk to women at bars? We'll go force yourself to go talk to two or three. Like make that decision. Or it could be something in your, I guess what I would say is anything that puts you in a in a mindset where you're like, oh, I should avoid doing this, go towards it.

Embrace it. Or on the flip side, anything that like feels like a struggle to avoid, such as, I don't know, picking up your phone all the time while you're doing stuff, right? Because the phone calls you to pick it up and you feel anxiety. If you say, oh, I'm just going to let that phone like sit there and buzz and beep and what have you. That's another opportunity to train that mental muscle because your alarm is essentially saying, hey, my phone is buzzing and beeping, I should pick it up. Like, this could be like life or death calling me.

And if you just like learn to sit with it for a minute, you'll feel that sensation and that alarm dissipate. And your brain will realize, oh, I'm in control. I get to make the decision. So even the simplest things like that are opportunities where you can train that mental muscle. As my favorite Peloton instructor, Emma Lovewell might say, change is inevitable. growth is optional.

Maybe you should write a book about that. There you go. I'll give you the royalties on the next book. But I think that is a very astute point is we're all going to change in different areas. But it's our, it depends on like whether we're adapting in a positive direction or not. And we're in charge of like putting ourselves in position to do those things. Often it's like, do we want to avoid the difficult thing and stay in this company? zone or do we want to embrace it? And the other reason, you know, the other thing I'd be remiss

if I didn't say because it ties into betting is if you look at gamblers, investment bankers, which is, you know, essentially gambling, is the psychology shows they are much better at being in tune in dealing with their emotions instead of avoiding it because they know when to listen and when to say, you know what, I'm not, I'm going to block this out and just move board with my process and my decision. So one of the things, it's really interesting you say that because another thing that I think gamblers do very well. And I wonder if this is something that you tell your athletes to do.

And if you talk about sort of a regular part of the practice is how much introspection do you have to do about previous performance? Yeah. So it's really important because, again, I think what happens here is when you introspect, what you're doing is two things is A, you're shifting to this like, I'm going to learn from the failure mindset. And then B, you're also making the success or failure. You're translating it from an emotional thing to essentially an analytical thing where it's like, okay, regardless of what happens. I'm going to process this and figure this out. And you see this difference between amateur and professional athletes all the time. Amateur athletes often like will flip out when you review an

introspect. Professionals see it as part of the job and it's like this is part of it. I need to get better. It's why quarterbacks like Tom Brady are obsessive of watching game deep. They're introspecting, they're learning, they're growing, all that good stuff. And we can either use that to our advantage or it can be this thing that we fear if we avoid it. So I think going towards that is a is a very important strategy. And people asking that all the time, they're like, how do you not freak out or like, you know, referee blows a game and I lose a bunch of money. Like, why don't you go on Twitter or go on the podcast and freak out? And it's just, I'm just so used to it. It's like literally it's just a waste of energy. You just describe it.

It's like, instead of freaking out and blaming, it's like, no, I made a mistake. I need to go back, look at myself, look what I did wrong, look what I looked over. looked. And I feel like that's one of the healthiest things for sports betters where it's like me and chat could come on every Tuesday and talk about how bad the refs were. Like we try not to because but sometimes we can't help it because we're just so mad. But like that's one of the things I've really learned where it's just like it's just I think you talked about it. It's like a waste of your mental energy. You're literally not improving your life. You're just venting about something that's already happened. So I do think that's just you just talked about it where it's like

I catch myself a lot trying to do that where it's like don't focus so hard on the past of things you can't control instead of focus on the future of things you can control. Exactly. And again, I, you know, maybe to illustrate this point for your listeners, again, I'm going to turn to the research, but there was this one study that compared essentially Eastern expert meditators versus Joe Blow American on the street when experiencing something that's like really stressful. And the typical American gets a triple dose of stress. They're freaking out going into the stressful thing. they're freaking out during the stressful thing.

And then that that stress is lingering after, just like Simon said. You look at expert meditators, their stress levels, both in their body and brain, only went up once during the difficult thing, when it's supposed to go up. So I think that lesson applies to the rest of us is if we're freaking out afterwards, after something stressful already occurred, like what good is, is that going to do? It's just going to cause us to kind of linger and be in a state where we can't process and deal with the thing and improve upon it. So how do we learn to turn that off and get back to kind of, you know, state Simon just talked about, which is, you know, process, deal with it,

analyze what I can do better and then move on to the next one. Do you think this kind of thinking leads to good karma? I do. I'm going to give you a. science answer, not surprisingly, to a karma question. Psychology shows that emotions are contagious. So if we are putting out negative emotions and energy into the world, that's going to translate to those who are around, to the people we're leading. There's actually fascinating psychology on coaches, like when coaches flip out and freak out during a game because, I don't know, ref blew the call. it actually leads to players like feeling more stress and performing worse. So I think the same applies to everybody else.

Is like are we putting this like positive emotional experience into the world? And if we do like good karma will come back on us. And if we're not, then I think that will last and linger. And the next go round, we might be slightly biased in a negative state or slightly biased to be like betting out of fear or worse. worrying about losing, which isn't the attitude we want to take towards performing. I think optimism wins. And I feel a hundred percent more optimistic, Steve, after talking to you on this podcast. I want everybody to go by do hard things. I want everyone to listen and relisten to this podcast. This is an amazing insight. And I think it's super helpful for

anybody who's about to enter the slog of betting over four, five, six months in the NFL, which can be whether you bet five bucks, 50 bucks, 500 bucks, 5,000 bucks, it's an emotional roller coaster because so much of it feels out of your control. So all of the mental exercises that you just talked about today are going to be invaluable for people. Thank you. Thanks so much. Really enjoyed this conversation. The book is Do Hard Things. The author is Steve Magnus, I am Chad Milman. He is Simon Hunter for Matt Mitchell. This has been the favorites podcast from the Volume Podcast Network. Download it from Spotify, Apple Podcasts, whatever you get your podcast, rate, review, subscribe, leave us five stars, say whatever you want.

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