I felt bored. And I did a pretty irresponsible thing.

I was on a call with two people from a publicly-traded company. I bet you even have their shares in your Robinhood account. The call was a super boring version of an enterprise sales playbook.

This is how we got to the point where they asked me: “What are you using for pooping unicorn flow control?” (or something close to this). And I came up with a random company name on the spot.

Yes, I felt bad for half a second. Why only for half a second? Subscribe to learn!

Okay, even if you didn’t subscribe, I deserve this for what I did. But for real? I wanted them to stop this enterprise torture.

Their answer shocked me.

“Oh yeah, those guys are doing an excellent job! We hear about them all the time.”

Next, they started to tell me how their tool was better. Their product was the number one alternative for the company that didn’t exist. They didn’t want to look stupid, and both of them came up with this nice story. Did I force these two guys to come up with a pile of lies? No, they didn’t want to look stupid in front of me.

It turned out that many researchers confirmed the same behavior. In one experiment, they took 5,000+ participants across finance, law, and medicine. Those are the people we rely on for our health and wealth. Researches mixed real industry terms with completely bonkers ones. Guess what happened? Experts claimed they knew all the fake terms. No one wanted to admit ignorance. It called the “expertise trap.”

Did you ever do something like this? Did you feel embarrassed afterwards? Because I did that a lot! In school, in my early career, in talks with people I admire. But now, I’m fine with showing that I don’t know something.

I call this “give a f* confidence.” I respect you and want to understand what we are talking about. This is how easy it is.

Be confident in not being confident, or else you will fall for my stupid jokes.