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The Dynamics of Status and Power

Q&A with Alison Fragale, Professor of Organizational Behavior at University of North Carolina and author of Likeable Badass: How Women Get the Success They Deserve.

Alison Fragale is a Professor of Organizational Behavior at University of North Carolina. She is author of Likeable Badass: How Women Get the Success They Deserve, which came out this week. We had a wide-ranging conversation about her book, covering the difference between status and power, why power has gotten all the focus (expecially for women) while status is mainly overlooked, and how to get ahead as a women while still being likeable (no small task). I hope you enjoy it as much as I did (both the conversation and the book).

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The important, overlooked dynamic between power and status

Annie: Likeable Badass hit for me personally as a woman. But it was also interesting because it generalizes to anybody, in terms of understanding the dynamics between the two core concepts of power and status. As we’re thinking about what gets us ahead in the world, I think that most of us think about power. Lots of books are written about how to gain power in the workplace or in your life.

I think you’re making this very interesting distinction between the two. Can you talk about how you think about power and how you think about status?

Alison Fragale: Power is about resource control. You have something that another person values. That thing could be money. It could be the authority to give you a good performance review. It could be to promote you. It could be car keys if you have a teenager. Anything that has value to another person is a resource. That resource gives you some control over them in the sense that they’re more likely to comply with your wishes because they want the thing that you have. The two that we talk about in the context of work are often pay and rank promotion. If I get to a certain level, it gives me more power.

Status is about how much you’re respected and regarded by other people. What do they think about you? It’s that idea of respect.

Power is both objective and subjective. It’s a resource. That’s objective. I have the car keys. It’s also subjective in that I only have power if you value that resource. If you didn’t value it, I wouldn’t have any control.

Status is completely subjective. I only get as much status as other people say I have for whatever reason, and therefore it’s not something I can grab or steal, like I could steal the car keys. That is an important distinction, which I think does depress people because it makes people feel that controlling status is so never-ending and so amorphous. But I try to make that feel more systematic.

Building out the power-status two-by-two

Annie: What the intersection is between power and status? Can you build out the four quadrants a little? Power with status, no power without status, power without status, and status without power?

Alison Fragale: When I think about a low-power, high-status person, that’s a highly respected person who doesn’t control anything. It could be your grandmother, who doesn’t necessarily control any resources, has no authority over you whatsoever, but you value that person’s advice. When they listen, you’re much more inclined to believe what they say is true and act on it. It could be anybody in your world that doesn’t control you, but that’s a person who, when they speak, you listen.

The high-power, low-status cell is one that I’ve spent a lot of time being interested in. That’s a person who controls stuff, but we don’t really respect them. The easiest way for people to understand that is to think about going through airport security. Somehow, going through security makes you be the worst version of yourself every time someone gives you an instruction. Take off that belt. But I didn’t have to take it off the last time. You can’t have this, but I could have it last time.

Why? Because it’s a tremendous amount of control over you. You do not get on that airplane without making those people happy. It doesn’t matter if the rules feel capricious or different than what the last person told you. They have absolute control over an important resource, but we don’t see it as a high-barrier-to-entry job. Therefore, we attribute a lot of malicious intent. We often behave as our worst selves. We’re crankier. We’re not as nice.

But the reality is that there’s another component. We really resent that combination of high-power, low-status. To have power but not status is to be subjected to a high level of mistreatment, often subtle mistreatment, that is just ambiguous enough to keep you out of trouble.

You can have one without the other. But the combination high-power and low status invites mistreatment while low-power and high-status is just fine. You don’t control anything, but you’re really respected. Those people are highly influential, and they’re often liked just as much as the people who have power.

Women with high-power, low-status

Annie: This is something that I found really interesting in the book, and tell me if I’m misreading this. Women seem to be more likely to end up in the high-power, low-status category in the workplace.

Alison Fragale: Gender is a status characteristic, but we have a lot of ascribed characteristics. We have race, we have sexual orientation, we have ethnicity, language, all different kinds of things. Anybody, obviously including women, who shows up in an environment where they have signals to the world that say, “I am less valued,” they are always going to be at risk, as they rise, of getting more power but not automatically getting more status.

What we see in the research is that power very often follows status. If I respect you, I’m much more willing to give you resources. There is not as strong a relationship between controlling resources as a means of getting respect.

If we coach people to get power, which I’ve been part of for my whole academic life, teaching people to negotiate and influence more effectively, that’s essentially a tool to gain all kinds of things. But to think about gaining power, then you’re helping people gain in one dimension and, without the other, that doesn’t automatically follow. You can be creating low-status power. I am not only concerned for women, but I am particularly concerned for women as a category because it’s more likely for women to become low-status power holders than men.

The title, Likeable Badass – and the bind for women

Annie: Let’s talk about the title, Likeable Badass, because I do feel like this is a huge bind for women, which I personally felt when I played poker.

This is an experience I had many times as a woman playing poker for a living, and it used to aggravate the hell out of me. I would be standing with an amazing male poker player, somebody like Phil Ivey or Erik Seidel, and a fan would come up. They would say to the male player, “Oh my gosh, you are so amazing. You’re so intense and you’re so competitive and you’re just so scary and I love watching you. You’re so incredible.” Then, they would look at me and say, “Oh, you have a nice smile. You should smile more.”

I felt that the things they were saying conferred status for those people. There’s status in possessing the intensity and competitive nature that you need to sit at a poker table. When I did it, and this happened to all the women in the game, I was a bitch. I looked bitchy. I didn’t look nice. Why wasn’t I smiling more? It’s very frustrating to me. But I see this across this idea of the “Ice Queen CEO.” What’s going on there in terms of power and status and perception?

Alison Fragale: About the title of the book, what I am hoping to do is introduce status, but also then make it feel more formulaic. It has a science to it. It’s not idiosyncratic judgments that people make of you. They’re basing their judgments on two things that we know we base all our interpersonal judgments on, which are essentially, how capable are you, and how caring are you? Do I see you as a person who’s really good at what you do, and do I see you as a person who is enjoyable, nice, gets along with others, and cares about people other than yourself? We value those two qualities. The science is very clear.

We value them in women and in men. We don’t enjoy hanging out with selfish assholes – men or women. We’ll avoid it if we can. But the difference of why men feel they have an easier path (which they do) is that there’s a reciprocal relationship between status and judgments of how competent and caring people are. This has been some of my work. If you have some high-status characteristic and they think of you as a highly respected person, they will fill in the rest of the details and will assume that you are both highly capable and highly caring.

I’ll use a white man here as our high-status demographic standard. If you’re a white, straight, cisgender man, then what’s going to happen in people’s brains is they’re going to assign some status to that because society has put all four of those demographic categories in the high-status bucket. They’re going to assign status to that. Then, the brain says, oh, they must be a very capable and caring person. From there, confirmation bias does most of the work for them.

If I’ve told you, “You’re going to meet this totally brilliant guy, he’s one of the nicest guys I’ve ever met,” when he starts talking, your brain is going to give him a lot of credit. If he’s not smiling, you’re not going to be worried about it. You’re just going to be like, I’ve already concluded this is a super nice guy and I’ve already concluded he’s super good at what he does. As we know from psychology, maintaining judgments is not that hard. For women, the idea is that the audience has not, and their non-conscious brain has not, assigned you into the high-status group.

They might have assigned you into the low-status group and therefore they’re concluding that you’re one or the other, but not both. That’s what we do for low-status people. If you want both, you’ve got to change people’s minds. That’s doable, but it does take a little bit of strategy. It explains why, if you are both standing there at the beginning, that person’s non-conscious brain has given Phil Ivey or Erik Seidel more status than you, and therefore assumed that they get both off the bat and you don’t. That’s why it’s maddening.

What I hope people can understand is that with a little bit of strategy in the beginning of relationships, you can start to change people’s minds before they’ve gotten to really thinking about you in any particular way. It is just a harder task. I don’t want to claim that it’s anything that it’s not. Men generally get handed a reputation and they just have to use confirmation bias. It’s like, you’re going to have to work hard to convince me now that you don’t deserve my respect in you, which men can do. I mean, they could lose it, but it’s a much harder than you having to convince me that you’ve earned that respect.

The effect of status on character descriptors and their meaning

Annie: Do you think that it’s also true, though, that the valence changes depending on whether a particular characteristic is worn by a high-status person versus a low-status person? Like with the word “ambitious.” When we say, “He’s so ambitious,” that’s very often a compliment. But, “She’s so ambitious,” is very often an insult – competitive, intense, driven. I feel like there’s a set of words that have to do with gaining power and the pursuit of power and resources, where those words are positive in describing men and negative in describing women. Everybody wants to be Steve Jobs, even though Steve Jobs was famously an asshole, but that was totally fine because he’s Steve Jobs, whereas I feel like for a woman that would never be tolerated.

Alison Fragale: You probably came across this study by Solomon Asch. He gave groups of people a list of character descriptors (like “intelligent-skillful-industrious-practical-cautious”). But he inserted in the middle of the list one other term: “warm” or “cold.” The other terms were viewed very differently based on whether “warm” or “cold” was included. It’s the same thing. The only difference in what you’re saying is that there’s an unspoken other dimension that we’re inferring but not saying. There are two dimensions that we care about. Competitive, decisive, ambitious – those are all on the vertical dimension of agency. When I say “competitive” and I describe a man, what people could hear is competitive in the warmest way possible, even though it hasn’t been said. When I say “competitive” and describe a woman, what people hear is competitive and cold. Even though the word hasn’t been said, the other dimension of where you fall drastically affects how you see the word via an agency term.

If I told you someone was a woman, and she’s super competitive and super helpful, that’s a different description than just a woman is competitive, because you’re filling in competitive and difficult. Competitive and bitchy. Competitive and quarrelsome. Even when the other dimension isn’t said, when we use an agentic or assertive label for one gender versus another, the audience is filling in the other dimension in a way that’s favorable to men and not favorable to women. If we were describing men as competitive and disagreeable, are there certain situations where would we be tolerant of it? Sure. But we would never prefer it to an equally competitive man who is warm and helpful.

There’s no dispute the best versions are the warm end and the agentic end. No one ever says, “I’m going for cold,” or “I’m going for submissive.” If you get a choice, and I ask you to pick where in the circle where you want to show up, everyone picks the same spot. That’s universal. We all want the same things.

I think the other universal is that there are a lot of complexities about what people are doing in their head, but the other part that is also fairly absolute is that if another human being puts you in the “very capable and very caring” category, that’s a win for you.

The idea is to acknowledge that it’s harder for women to get there, but you’ve got to control the controllables. We have enough evidence of controllables in psychology that you want to make sure that if the world isn’t going to automatically throw you in that cell, you’re doing everything you can to get put in it, and avoiding things that you might be unaware of that are holding you back.

My hope is to acknowledge the reality of a lot of double standards, a lot of non-conscious bias. But if we understand that two dimensional space of assertiveness and warmth, we can start to think a little more strategically about how do I get my audience to see me that way? I think the analogy of sales is somewhat apt. When you sell stuff, you recognize that every audience member is not going to see it the same way and that some people will buy it without being sold it. We always want people to buy us without us having to sell. The audience judgment on status is not that different than the audience judgment of whether I want your vacuum cleaner or your book.

Transforming perceptions

Annie: I want to imagine two different people. You can address them in whatever order you want. Somebody who has gained power, a woman who has gained power but doesn’t necessarily have status. This person would not be a likeable badass. They might indeed be a badass because they’ve gotten what they want, but it’s holding them back because people don’t view them as warm. I want to think about that person. What is your advice for them to become, to transform themselves into a likeable badass? Why would that be something that it would be important for them to do? That’s number one.

Then, number two would be someone who’s early in their career who doesn’t have status or power. How are they supposed to think about managing perception? Should they be focused more on building status or power?

Those are two separate questions. You can address them in whichever order you want.

Alison Fragale: Okay, I’ll go in the order you’ve said and bounce back and forth. Look, the answer to both is the same. But the first question you asked, is the one people most want me to solve for them. They’ve gotten themselves into a bit of a hole in the sense that they’ve been branded as a badass, but in a bitchy way. I have the answer that they don’t like, which is, “Has there ever been someone you’ve not respected or not liked, who you’ve changed your mind about?” Everyone will say, sure, yeah, I have.

Well, was it easy? How long did it take? You can change people’s minds once their opinion is already formed, but it’s not as easy as creating the initial belief.

My advice there is that you’ve got to do the same things I’m going to tell a young person to do. You just have to do them for longer and more consistently, because now you have a reputation-changing problem, a mind-changing problem. When you want to get people to change any deeply entrenched belief, whether or not you’re a bitch, or which presidential candidate is the best one, can you do it? Sure. But we know it’s a lot of work. The advice in the two situations is not a different magical set of tricks, but the same things. You just have to do them for longer if you have to change an already-formed belief.

Annie: Can you give me an example of someone who’s successfully done that?

Alison Fragale: I have personal examples from my own life of people who have done that. I don’t know if I have a famous-person example. The ones that stick out to me the most are actually not women. They’re men that I didn’t respect or liked when I started to work with them. I’m like, that person’s an empty suit. One of my most favorite people is someone I worked with at UNC. I thought this person wasn’t respecting me, that they were super patronizing to me. I was pregnant and I remember in one of our initial interactions, he said, “Let’s get you off your feet.” I thought, “I can manage my own standing and sitting, thank you very much. You’re not my boss.” I thought of him as really patronizing as a result. I didn’t see him as very warm because I thought he was putting me down and I didn’t see him as uniquely valuable in any way. Then, what happened over time is that I got to observe him as being very, very, knowledgeable in what he did, which was an expert in military leadership training, which is something I got into. Then, I saw him using that expertise to bring me along and help me be a star in those situations and talking me up and doing those things. I came around.

What I would say to people in that situation, where you have a lot of power but not a lot of status, is, “You’ve got to lean into your haters, which is the thing that people least want to do.” I have this position. You’re not respecting me. You don’t like me. You’re doing all these things behind my back. You’re cutting me out of the information flow. You’re doing what people do to low-status power holders. I feel terrible about it. We know that human behavior is reciprocated, so what am I more likely to do? Be nasty to those people in turn because they haven’t been nice to me, and it only escalates and furthers the bias that you’re not a nice person. At that point, you’ve got to say, “If someone thinks I’m a bitch, how do I convince them I’m not?” I have to be useful to them. I have to have them see me go out of my way to help them. I have to give them evidence that they reached the wrong conclusion, and that’s leaning in, not leaning out.

People never want to hear that because they ask, “I have to go be nice to people who have essentially made my life miserable?” I think that’s the only way you can change that cycle.

“It’s much easier to avoid a problem than to solve one”

Annie: Let’s go back to my second question. What advice do you have for someone just starting out?

Alison Fragale: I think it’s much easier in the second situation, where it’s early in your career. If I get to those people soon enough, I say, “It’s much easier to avoid a problem than to solve one.” What does that mean? It means get in people’s heads before they’ve even started thinking about you.

I don’t talk to a lot of people on airplanes, but occasionally I do, and sometimes you talk to the person the entire flight and by the end of the flight you like them. You’ve learned a lot about them. You think they’re pretty great at whatever it is they’re doing. I’ve had a couple of those random encounters, whether it’s at an airport or some other place, where I’ve actually developed a relationship with a person in a couple hours, or not even that in 10 minutes of standing in line behind somebody at the DMV or an airport or something, you can strike up a conversation and your brain can be, “I like this person and this person’s badass.”

That’s what I want for people. You might start making some judgments when you look at a person before starting to talk to them. But those judgments are not very set at all. When that person opens their mouth and starts interacting with you, they’re close to a blank slate and it’s pretty easy for them to shape the way you see them in 10 minutes.

Status is so easily built when you don’t need it. It’s easy to show up as capable of caring when you don’t need anything from the other person. When people are new and so low in the organization that no one is thinking about them, they have that mentality. It’s such a tremendous opportunity, if you don’t waste it, that no one cares about you. No one’s paying attention to you. You can tell whatever story you want if you get out there and start telling it. That can mean actions too. Start doing it well.

That way, people start even knowing you exist is as that helpful person who gave me some good information or told me a funny story on your way to deliver my copies or whatever it was. Now, I know who that person is. That’s what I want people to take from this.

The person who thinks that they have no power because they don’t hold the position is incorrect. The newcomer has the power to tell their story and to shape that story from day one. They’re a complete blank page. We can talk about the specific strategy, but that’s my advice. The most important thing to say to yourself about a person around you is, “I want that person to leave with this idea that I’m a capable, caring person, and I can shape that in all different kinds of ways.” Many of them I can do in minutes or less.

With status, power comes

Annie: I’m a young career professional and I’ve just started a new job, and I want to go places. Should I be more focused on status or more focused on power?

Alison Fragale: With status, power comes. Having a lot of status means that, in the sphere of people who are influential in your life, they highly respect you and value you. Then, what’s going to happen? Someone needs to get promoted. In the set of your peers, you are the most highly respected and valued. Status increases the chances that you get picked. Or you have to go advocate for stuff and you’re advocating to someone who says, “I really respect you and value you.” They’re much more likely to say yes. When you think about all the asks you make of other people, all the asks I’ve had to make in the process of writing and launching a book, you need a bazillion favors.

When you ask a favor of somebody who says, “I really respect you,” you don’t even have to wait until they finish the sentence. They’re like, “If I can help, sure, let me help. I’ll use whatever resources are in my power for your benefit.” With the status, which is respect and value, the power is going to come. It’s either going to be handed to you or you have to negotiate for it, which can still happen.

Then, when I flip it and say, “You go in and you ask for the promotion, and your boss doesn’t really think you do great work. Whether or not you do, the boss just doesn’t value you, sees you as complete commodity, completely replaceable. Do you think you’re going to get it?” No. Power and status are both fundamental human needs. When we lack either, life is worse. I’m not diminishing power at all, but we triage. So many people are like, let me get promoted. Let me get the raise. I want to be promoted and get the raise, too. But if that’s your singular focus, you can miss the idea of how one does that. One does that by convincing your audience that you’re worth it, and the way you convince your audience you’re worth it is they see you bringing something of value to the table. The value you bring is being really capable and using those skills for people other than myself. If, at every opportunity, you do that, then the power comes. That’s the idea.

Kate: A story of a likeable badass

Annie: I think you tell so many great stories in the book, but I want to make this a little bit more concrete for people. This idea of, well, what does it mean? I want people to like me. I want people to see me as competent. I want people to see me as warm or helpful or have warm feelings when they think about me. That all feels a little bit amorphous. Can you give a simple example that’s concrete for people so that they understand how small an act can be or what types of acts can help you gain the status and what the result of doing that might be?

Alison Fragale: At the beginning of Chapter 2, I introduced the story of Kate, a true likeable badass. I met Kate when I spoke at her company’s annual women’s conference, and she was phenomenal at managing her status.

Kate was basically told very early on by her boss, “Your job is to make my life easier.” She was put off by that, but also said, “Okay, that’s my job. How do I make people’s lives easier?” She went about her day with that mentality.

People asked her to do some ridiculous stuff, like when her boss found bedbugs in his New Jersey hotel room and had her research local fumigators. She realized very quickly that this was non-promotable work, but they also asked her to do things that were getting her noticed.

When it was raised in a meeting that they needed to do a presentation, she offered to do the PowerPoint slides because that was one thing she knew she could contribute. She told me, “But very quickly I realized that I wasn’t just making slides. I was telling stories. I was willing to do the mundane work of putting the PowerPoint together, but I was also able to do the high-level work, which is to tell a story through charts and graphs in a way that would be compelling to an audience. I was adding real value.”

Once she started doing that, people started asking her for more of those things. It came about through a little bit of trial and error, being willing to do things that were helpful to people and then quickly ditching the ones that didn’t allow her to show her capability. She leaned into it and built it from there.

Shine a light: Being helpful and capable vs. being taken advantage of

Annie: I know I’ve taken a lot of your time, which I really appreciate. I just want to ask you a final question. How do you draw the line between being helpful and being taken advantage of?

Kate’s making PowerPoints for people, but there could be some point at which maybe people are just taking advantage of her. In other words, they’re getting free labor. I may be gaining some status, but I’m not actually getting power from it. They may in fact be taking credit. If I go around telling everybody I did that, then that’s going to take my status away. I’m going to be seen as someone who goes around trying to take credit for things, which I assume is not a great thing. How do you think about those issues?

Alison Fragale: The first is there is a fine line between building status and non-promotable work, and we know that women get saddled with more non-promotable work. I think it’s trial-and-error and observe the results. When Kate did the PowerPoint, she realized right away, when another high-level person came to her, “Well, at least this person knows I exist.” She could start to get the idea that it was getting her some good traction. You do have to pay attention to the results, just like any experiment. I do think that this idea of being an experimentalist is not just for academics. Try it and if it’s not getting you good results, then ditch that and try something else.

There’s no way to know that it’s going to work for your audience until you do it. But if it’s not that much effort and the experiment’s not that big, you can afford a lot of failed experiments. My first piece of advice is to watch for the reaction and be willing to shift if it’s not getting you something.

Second, you do have to tell the story that you did this thing. There are different ways to do it, but you have to get the story out there. If you do something in your basement, no one knows about it. It isn’t going to build you status. It has to be good work, and the audience has to recognize it.

You don’t want to get in a battle for credit, but you can do a lot of things in advance. Let’s say I’m going to work on this presentation on someone else’s behalf. At some point, you should ask things like, “Where would there be opportunities as I work on these presentations to continue to build my skills beyond that? Can I come to the meeting? Can I get to ever present a slide? Can I be there in case the questions come up about how I did the analysis, so I could talk about it?”

That’s where good negotiation skills come in. Be an advocate for yourself. It’s not just about having someone give you credit on the footer of the slide. It’s more about saying, “I would like to use this as a stepping stone to build my skills.” If that person values you, you could recruit them as your agent to help you shine in other places. And if they really do value you, they’re generally going to be happy to help. Find one person that thinks you’re amazing and ask them to tell your story, to talk you up.

I’ve also found that one of the easiest ways we can get other people to give us credit and build ourselves is by us doing it for them first. You can go around saying positive things about anybody you want at any level, and those things should be true. When you use your mouth to spread positivity about other people’s great work, even if that’s all you do, they are going to reciprocate and they’re going to hear it and they’re going to start to do the same thing for you. That is the strategy piece of doing the unique thing that has value, paying attention, and experimenting. Then, use these other tools to start getting other people to tell the story.

What poker can teach us about the relationship between status and power

Annie: Can I give you a weird analogy from poker?

Alison Fragale: Of course, please do.

Annie: In poker, the goal isn’t to get money. The actual goal is to play poker well, because the result of that happens to get you money. If you focus on the getting money part, you actually won’t get money because you won’t have played well.

Alison Fragale: Exactly.

Annie: It’s all of these process goals around how I actually play this game. The result of doing that well will cause you to accumulate money. It sounds like you’re saying the same thing, that if your focus is on gaining power, first of all, you might end up being malevolent. Let’s just start with that. But if you’re focusing on gaining status, then power will come as a result of it.

Alison Fragale: That’s a hundred percent right. I like that analogy, and I think for a lot of people, the idea of chasing power feels more tractable. It feels easier because if I say to you, “Get paid more, get promoted,” that might be one conversation a year. If I say, “Get everybody that ever has met you to have respect you,” that starts to feel daunting.

There are a couple of reasons we haven’t been chasing status. One is we can’t even label it. A lot of people don’t know it’s a thing. I wanted call this book Likeable Badass: How Women Win the Status Game. The editor told me, “You can’t call it that because no one knows what status is, which is why you have to write the book. But you can’t put the thing that people don’t understand in the title. It’s not a good way to sell books.”

I took that advice, but I also thought that about the important idea behind the advice. If you can’t label it, you don’t even know how to go after it. Once I put a label on it, tell you what it is, and that it’s actually easier than you think, you can understand why you should go after it. This thing I’m giving you is easier than chasing one raise or one promotion a year and thinking you’re done. I hope it’s also more fun than going in and negotiating for more money. It’s showing up the way that you actually see yourself. It’s showing up the way that you want other people to see you, which is a person who has value to offer and cares about other people. That’s all it is.

When you start to think about it that way, it is playing well. It is satisfying in and of itself. In addition. showing up as my true, valuable self and adding value to other people’s lives and getting to showcase my skills, that is a great way to live. That brings me joy. By the way, it has this ancillary benefit of when I do want to have control, which I also want in my own way, that people will be interested in giving it to me. I want people to understand that it’s easier, not harder, than it might seem at first.

Annie: That’s awesome. I wish I’d had this book a long time ago. It would’ve been extremely helpful, particularly for the world that I was in, because these things become much more challenging when 3% of the population in a given industry is female. It exaggerates a lot of this stuff. It’s such a practical book and it’s so lovely that I have no doubt it’s going to be a huge hit.

Alison Fragale: Thank you, Annie.

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