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Finding Real Edges — Seeking Out the Unpleasant Advantage 2:34 Eli: Okay, Miles, let’s talk about these "real edges." Cate Hall mentions this concept in the context of poker, and it blew my mind. She says modern poker is hyper-competitive, with pros spending all their time studying mathematical "solver models" for tiny advantages. But she found this huge, glaring edge that everyone else was ignoring. Do you remember what it was?
2:55 Miles: It was physical reads. The "tells." And what is fascinating is that when she told other pros she was studying reads, their reaction was "nuh-uh, that is not a thing." They flat out denied it was valuable.
3:08 Eli: Why would they do that? If someone says, "Hey, here is a way to win more money," why would a professional gambler say it is fake?
3:15 Miles: Because if they admitted it was a thing, they would feel obligated to study it. And studying physical reads is hard, it is messy, and it is probably a bit "woo-woo" compared to clean math. This is the core of the "real edge" philosophy. An edge isn't just a clever trick—it is often something that lives in a "cloud of aversion." It is something people don't want to do because it’s annoying, unpleasant, or socially friction-heavy. Agency is about piercing through that cloud and saying, "I am willing to do the work that makes other people uncomfortable."
3:48 Eli: So it is like a strategic blindness? We pretend the edge doesn't exist so we don't have to feel guilty about not pursuing it? That is such a human reaction. I think about how many times I have said "that wouldn't work for me" just because the steps required sounded tedious.
4:05 Miles: Precisely. It is about identifying the "tradeoffs that stay obscured." We often don't even realize we are choosing not to do something—we just feel a vague sense of "ugh" and move on. High-agency people lean into the "ugh." They look for the "lowest hanging fruit" that everyone else is too dignified or too bored to pick.
4:26 Eli: Like feedback! That was one of the big ones Cate mentioned. Most of us say we want feedback, but do we really? She calls it "cooking without tasting." If you aren't getting real, raw feedback from people who know you, you have no idea how you are actually showing up in the world.
4:42 Miles: And she has a very specific, high-agency way of doing it. She does not just ask her friends, "Hey, how am I doing?" because she knows social dynamics will make them lie to her or sugarcoat it. She puts an anonymous feedback link in her Twitter bio. She literally invites the world to tell her what is wrong with her.
5:00 Eli: That sounds terrifying. I am getting that "cloud of aversion" feeling just thinking about it. She even mentioned getting a "gut punch" message once in a while that calls out a real issue. But her response isn't to hide—it is to get to work fixing it. She even learned about her "uptalk"—you know, that rising inflection at the end of sentences—from YouTube comments! Most people would just block the commenters, but she saw it as free data for self-improvement.
5:25 Miles: That is agency in action. It is treating yourself like a product that can be iterated on. If you want to be more agentic, you have to stop protecting your ego and start hunting for those "gut punches." Because once you have that info, you can actually do something about it. Otherwise, you are just flying blind.
5:43 Eli: It is about becoming "unflappable." She tells that story about playing a poker hand so badly that there were news stories about it. She could have folded and no one would have noticed, but she made a call that she knew would lead to "certain ridicule" because she was testing her own boundaries. She wanted to see if she could handle the embarrassment. That is a wild way to live—deliberately courting ridicule just to prove to yourself that you can survive it.