The Brett McKay here and welcome to another edition of the Art of Manliness Podcast.

And what if I told you, there's a performance enhancing drug that's completely free, completely

legal, and has no ill side effects when used correctly?

Oh, and you've probably already taken it many times in your life.

Well, that drug is competition. And today on the show, I talked to author Poe Brosts in about

his book Top Dog that digs deep into the science of competition and how it can prove our performance

in a wide variety of tasks. And today's podcast, Poe and I discuss the difference between adaptive

and mouth-adaptive competition that's good and bad competition. The culture of virtuous competition

that exists amongst the aging Greeks and how you can shape competition to make you a better man

in all aspects of your life. Really interesting show. After the show is over,

check out the show notes at a-wim.is slash top dog.

Poe Bronson, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me, I really appreciate it.

So you co-authored a book a few years ago called Top Dog, the Science of Winning and Losing,

which is all about the research about what competition, how it influences performance,

what it does to our biology, our psychology. But let's start off with this because you are

you in the book that competition has all these enormous benefits that come with improving performance.

But it seems like these days competition has sort of a PR problem. There's this ethos and public

schools and in public life that co-operation beats competition. So why does competition seem

to have this PR problem these days? The fact that it has a PR problem is a lot of why we were

motivated to work on the book in the first place. And we felt a significant disconnect between what

the science of research was saying and this default thinking about competition.

And one of the things that is there is just as we wanted to emphasize throughout our society that

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