Confidence
Overthink
Ellie Anderson, Ph.D. and David Peña-Guzmán, Ph.D.
4.7 • 549 Ratings
🗓️ 11 November 2025
⏱️ 61 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Don’t shy away from this one! In episode 147 of Overthink, Ellie and David discuss confidence. Modernity has created a crisis of confidence, leading to the demand that we all maximize our confidence. But what is confidence? Is it a personality trait or a relational concept? What causes under- and over-confidence? And is instilling confidence an equity issue? Your hosts think through Charles Pépin’s pillars of confidence, Don A. Moore's formula for calibrating your confidence, and the gendered nature of confidence through bodily expressions. In the Substack bonus segment, Ellie tells an embarrassing story which reveals the situational nature of confidence, and they discuss the relationship between confidence and nature.
Works discussed:
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Self-Reliance”
Don A. Moore, Perfectly Confident: How to Calibrate Your Decisions Wisely
Charles Pépin, Self-Confidence: A Philosophy
Iris Marion Young, “Throwing Like a Girl: A Phenomenology of Feminine Body”
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Hello and welcome to Overthink. |
| 0:19.8 | The podcast were two overly confident philosophers tell you why our discipline has all the answers. |
| 0:26.7 | I met Dr. David Peña-Gusman. |
| 0:29.0 | And I'm Dr. Ellie Anderson. |
| 0:30.9 | Ellie, I want to tell you a story about a crisis of confidence that I had that has shaped my entire career as a professional philosopher. |
| 0:39.9 | Picture it. The year is 2011. I'm a third year graduate student at Emory. I think that's when we met, |
| 0:45.8 | right? Yeah. 2011. I went to a conference at Vanderbilt University in Nashville. It was the annual |
| 0:52.3 | meeting of philosophy, a feminist continental philosophy |
| 0:55.9 | association. And I was giving my very first presentation as a philosopher. It was a talk on |
| 1:02.6 | Heidegger and Harroway on temporality and violence. And as I got up to the podium to give this talk, |
| 1:09.4 | I could just sense my body turning on me. |
| 1:12.4 | Oh, no. |
| 1:12.9 | Like my hands were shaking. |
| 1:14.7 | I was sweating profusely. |
| 1:16.8 | And you know how in the movies when somebody dies and you see the soul just rise out of their body? |
| 1:21.6 | Yeah. |
| 1:22.3 | I just saw and felt all my self-confidence leak out of my body and dissipate into the ether. |
| 1:29.3 | Oh, honey. |
| 1:30.3 | And so I had this crisis of self-confidence as I was beginning to give this talk and it went terribly. |
| 1:37.3 | Oh, no. |
| 1:38.3 | Oh, no. |
| 1:39.3 | I'm shocked to hear this because I would never have expected this of you. |
... |
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