a16z Podcast - a16z Podcast: The Asshole Survival Guide

Episode Date: September 13, 2017

with Michael Dearing (@mcgd), Bob Sutton (@work_matters), and Hanne Tidnam (@omnivorousread) Bob Sutton's book The No Asshole Rule was all about how to foster company cultures that don't tolerate asshole behavior. But sometimes, dealing with an asshole is unavoidable -- in life or at work. So what are the best tactics to both protect yourself and to stop the asshole behavior? This is the subject that Sutton tackles in his new book, The Asshole Survival Guide.  In this somewhat NSFW episode, a16z's Hanne Tidnam talks with Bob Sutton, professor at Stanford; and Michael Dearing, Founder of Harrison Metal and formerly at Stanford and eBay, about tackling asshole behavior -- everything from assessing it (are you dealing with an asshole?) to coping mechanisms, to how to systemize a way of squashing and preventing asshole behavior in the workplace. (Bonus: a surprising truth about EQ in the workplace!)

Hi and welcome to the A16Z podcast. I'm Hannah and we're here today having a conversation with Bob Sutton, author of The No Asshole Rule and Professor at Stanford, and Michael Deering, founder of Harrison Meadow and Bob's former colleague at Stanford as well. And you should be aware that there are a lot of expletives in this episode. So do keep that in mind if you have little ones listening in the background. We're here today because Bob has a brand new book out, the asshole survival guide, that takes off from where the no asshole rule left off. In other words, it really gets down to the nitty-gritty of dealing with this kind of person and their behavior. Everything from assessing whether or not you're an asshole yourself to coping strategies of protecting yourself from assholes and finally tactics to actually change or put a stop to asshole behavior. The first guest voice you'll hear is Michael Deering, who rumor has it was a champion of Bob writing the second book on assholes. We heard that you were, I will not say that you were the inspiration behind this book. But that you urged Bob to write this book. Is that right? What's the story there. What I said to Bob after the No Asshole Rule was so wildly successful, what, almost 10 years ago. And I said, Bob, this is lightning in a bottle. You got to build the whole franchise. H-O-L-E. The whole franchise around this. You could have a version of this for personal relationships, for work relationships, for peer relationships.

Well, because it is such an essential human problem. It's kind of like the definition of humanity. It is. And the main thing that happened is the no asshole rule, which at least I thought was a book about, well, this is how you build a relatively asshole-free place. But the response was people just sent me all these emails and all these stories that were kind of the same, which is. They made you their therapist. And they would say, I've got an asshole. Help.

Help. And 8,000 emails. And I kept reading the literature. And I kept being pressed back by my friend Michael to the whole franchise. Well, I want to hear a little bit about all those emails. You got them from congregations, right? Hospitals, nurses, like all different contexts, all different kinds of people. What were some of the most challenging examples that really were surprising to hear that you thought,

I'm stumped by this or like, or was it all the same brand of asshole? No, no, no, no, there are. So the way I. Bob's moaning. He's remembering these emails. But the way I define an asshole is from the receivers standpoint, somebody who leaves you feeling demeaned, de-energized, disrespected. I'll give you an example when actually it was really difficult. There was a woman who wrote me that she was in her second year of a clerkship for a federal judge.

And she described the federal judge, total assholes. And he'd have raging temper tantrums like unreliable water delivery, you know, like the water didn't come. And she said the two other young clerks, young lawyers she worked with were so depressed. They put their headstead on their desks and they pound their heads up. And she just wanted to get out after years. It's really toxic environment. And that's some of your advice, right, is to just quit. So that was my first reaction.

Yeah. And I said, well, why don't you quit? And she said, well, here's what happens if I quit. She had sued loans. And then her mentors explained to her that if she quit halfway through a federal clerkship, it was career suicide. And so when you're in that mode where. You're stuck.

You're stuck. So kind of what you got to do is you've got to find ways to not go crazy. And it's funny because one thing that I actually got interested in part because of Michael is cognitive behavioral therapy. He talks about the cognitive distortions of successful founders. Yeah. Oh, interesting. So I'm also drawing on some of Aaron Beck's work in my chapter on mind tricks that protect your soul. And they're just ways so that even though you're in an objectively bad environment in this case, that it doesn't upset you so much.

It is so much about perspective, right? Because it's both the perspective of, like, how am I perceiving this behavior right now? And the perspective of, like, am I aware of my own behavior? So you talk about a whole, a whole way of assessing is somebody actually an asshole? Like, am I subjected to an asshole right now? Or is it just. Or am I the asshole? And also, I want to check.

Are we both assholes? That happens a lot. Or are we just in an asshole moment, you know, like, how much of it is context? And how do you tease that apart and figure out, like, is this situation? assholiness or is this like? Well, it's really, it's really tough. If you look at all the biases we have as human beings, it's probably best to be slow to label other people as assholes and to be fast to label ourselves. But Michael said something to me. I still remember it, which is such good advice. I kind of want to ask him about it is this notion that there's a difference between what you do and how you do it. Oh, it was given to me by a boss I had back in the day when I was first struggling with how do I let people go when it was time to say goodbye to somebody, you know, in voluntarily. And do it in a way that you're not being an asshole. That's right. Yeah. The decision you're taking can be a difficult and inherently negative one, but the wrapper, the container that you put it in doesn't have to be barbed wire covered with dog poop. Yeah. It's a colorful. Yeah, yeah. You bring up that

that idea of what you do versus how you do it for anybody who feels like their work is putting them in a position to be an asshole involuntarily, right? And a lot of times managers are put in that space where they have to make a really hard choice. They have to disappoint somebody. Could be easily interpreted as being an asshole. That's a management choice. That's a design choice that every manager gets to make. How do I rap and contain this decision, knowing that it is really painful for that person to hear it? It also puts responsibility on you, right? Like, you can't just say, this is something I have to do. Oh, well, it sucks. You know, sorry. So the first time I think I ever heard Michael say that is we were visiting walmart.com. We're doing a project together.

From Stanford. We're doing a graduate project. This woman runs up to him and says, Michael, Michael, and gives the biggest hug. It's so happy to see him. And then she goes away and he whispers. He said, I fired her. That's an amazing testament to how you did that. Geez, I wish I could remember who that was.

I think it's really true that if done the right way, parting ways with somebody and one of our general partners, Lars has said this, like, can actually be an enormous gift to them to get their life into, you know, onto a different track that's better for them that they would choose. It can be something good. It is, not to sound too, you know, B.S.E. and kumbaya about capitalism, but it is actually a beautiful feature of our system where, I mean, if you start with the premise that you have other options, and that's where I'd go back to that law clerk and I would say, you've been lied to. Right. You are not the first person to walk out of a clerkship halfway through. Yeah. Escape. There are thousands of other options. If I have. If I have.

had to add any chapters to your book. It would be this one. It would be about cultivating those options while you go so that you are never stuck. You never want to be stuck realizing, okay, I work for the wrong person. She or he treats me like garbage. I don't have other options. I have to start, cold start, cultivating new ones. Cultivating options all along the way every day and everything you do is like, that's our job. And I take that advice from Reed Hoffman's book where he talks about these career journeys are tours of duty. They're not lifetime sentences. It kind of reminds me of when I first learned to drive. A family friend was like, I'm always aware of my escape routes. And that's just good being a good citizen on the road. There's different situations

where you've got, where enduring assholes is unavoidable and maybe even worth it. And one of my better choice. Yeah. So one of my friends is funny. He's a guy who wrote me from the U.S. Air Force Academy. he's being haste and he's a standard trick. A standard coping trick is you imagine it's the future and it wasn't that bad and it was worth getting through it. You call this time travel, right? Time travel. Classic temporal distancing and he'd say, I would just look at them while they were screaming

at me and just imagine it was two years later and I was flying my plane and it was all worth it. That's a pretty good coping strategy now. If you were in a situation where that was gone every day and there was no end in sight and you're just lying to yourself, it's not very healthy. not actually the future. It's a fantasy. It's escapism. Yeah. That's interesting. Well, I want to talk a little bit still about assessment, if we can. Are there traits that seem like assholiness, but that actually aren't, you know, that can have that this, that are not necessarily that toxic, but that kind of like

in the way you actually run your business, in the way you interact, but like that feel unpleasant. So let me start out at least my perspective, but there are some things that are objective assholes. So if I stood up, swore at you and said you were the most disgusting person I ever met and you didn't earn it. Like I think that we might be pretty clearly that I would say what an asshole and we would all agree with you. But what about just being difficult, being a curmudgeon, being prickly? I really emphasize this perspective that the definition of an asshole is somebody who makes you feel like dirt. But then once you start untangling it, it might be because of something they're doing. It might be because of your reaction or it might be doing something you're doing to

incite them. This joke I first heard of Google years ago, they were talking about engineers who had a bad user interface in a good operating system or porcupines with the heart of gold as it would be another way to put it. And I think that there are certain people who just, they just have a bad UI. And once you get to know them are actually great. And then by the way, there's the bullshitters who are the opposite, which is the, they have all friends who are less than a month old. So to me, this eye of the beholder part is, is really part of it. And that's part, that's part of the assessment, if you will, that you've got to make. But on the other hand, if you're working with a porcupine with the heart of gold, and you've only got two weeks with him, and this is where

time horizon, I always talk about time horizon, is really important. You just might not have time to get there. Yeah. So you have to always consider what your time, well, what your investment is in terms of time. But you do a really good job describing other ways besides time and distance to cope or shock absorb these people, right? Using electronic communication or asynchronous communication. Let's talk about some of those coping strategies. Because I feel like there are two buckets, right? One of them is sort of defensive and protective and the other is more proactive and more challenging and more, what do you call it? It's changing them or defeating them. So to me, it's either get out, take it, or find some way to fight them. To adjust. Find some way to change them

or defeat them. Because it can even be converting them and making them your friend. There's three basic kinds of strategies. There's you get out. The other one is you reduce the damage you suffer, which is either by kind of getting away from the toxins or not having them bother you so much. And then the last one is changing your situation in some way, fighting back, converting the asshole. Michael, you fall into, you tend towards a particular kind of way of dealing with it. Oh, yeah, fleeing. Really? I'm with her. Fleeing. Hiding.

Fleeing is the number one. Hiding. Well, I think fleeing in the sense that like you just have to say what you're tolerating what you won't and work situations where you can't, you just don't want to be part of it. You got to go and find, create other options. So it's more like opting out than fleeing. Yeah, with full agency and you're the driver of your own life kind of point of view. Right. I'm out.

And, and, but I would say that. the part of this toolkit that Bob lays out that I think is incredibly valuable. If you're going to stay, you need shock absorbers and shields. And if you're going to fight back, there's a set of things you can do. And fighting back doesn't mean sinking to the lowest common denominator behavior. It means like arming yourself with the tools and tricks to get through the day. All right. So let's get into some of those.

So what are some of the most, the more surprising ones that don't feel like human instinct necessarily? You know, that you're like, okay, I want to, I'm going to blow up. I'm going to go to HR. What's the normal? What do you think most people tend to do? Well, I think most people tend to really complain a lot and not do very much. They stuff it down and they email people like Bob and say, this is awful. And a lot of them just take it. And so to me, even if you are fighting back, I think doing effective mind tricks or the cognitive behavioral therapy tricks are still good for you to do to sort of minimize the amount you suffer from just the objective. stimuli in abuse you're taking. So we already mentioned time travel, temporal distancing, a lot of evidence that that helps, good experimental evidence, laughing at it actually with your friends. Oh, I love. Humor is such an effective, in fact, in both ways, I think, both protective and sort of aggressive humor. Oh, yeah. Humor is a very effective insult delivery system. It's a, and then one of my But I think of it is not just in terms of slinging insults, but I also think it's a really effective mirror when you, you know, to like throw up in front of somebody, even if you're not being mean in your

humor, even if you're being funny or self-deprecating. But it does cause a pause. You know, it sort of reflects someone's behavior back to. So there's an example in the book. And the guy, he was a CEO of a major local company, an IPO in the 80s around here, okay? And it's pretty tough ex-military guy. And he liked vegetable humor. So he was always insulting his team. You're even dumber than a head of lettuce. The average zucchini. he could figure that out. And so one day he goes into the boardroom. And he's got the whole, the whole management team, including him, is lined up heads of lettuce, glasses and sunglasses in their same place. And they got T-shirts and everything. And he said, this is delivering the message.

He said, yeah, I was a pretty tough boss. But you just said, pause. He said, before I'd start screaming at him, that would make me pause. And if I did start going after them, they would kind of point the t-shirt that I might be wearing, that accomplish the tension, release, the communication, and the bonding of the senior management teams. It's pretty healthy, actually. I helped him build some self-awareness, too. Yes, yes. About the consequence of that behavior.

Well, self-awareness, that's actually one of the things I wanted to ask you, because this all feels like it requires a certain level of a self-awareness, but also kind of like general EQ. What about for those people who don't, who aren't highly attuned? Like, this is very much about reading people well. reading yourself well, and adjusting. In general, there's very good evidence of, by the way, EQ is one of the most overrated concepts on the planet.

You're kidding. It's there. It matters. But if you look at the evidence, it's about a good guess, 10% as important as old-fashioned IQ. And what do you mean by important in terms of impacting? The researchers from Yale who invented the concept and did all of the research as opposed to the people who popularized and got rich off of it, they will show you the studies that if you're predicting success in the job, it's about a 10th.

It's not that it's irrelevant. And the other thing about EQ is that people with high EQ are especially good at manipulating others to ill means. So it exists, but it's a concept that has been way over glorified. So does that not relate then to this idea that it doesn't really matter whether you're an asshole or not? No, no, no, no. The way that I would put it in part is that if you look at research on self-awareness,

you can measure EQ. and people who have EQ probably somewhat more self-aware of how their emotions are received and how the sensitivity of others. But essentially, we're all so bad at it. Oh. That, that... I thought you were going to say exactly the opposite. We're all pretty good.

No, no, no. The evidence about self-awareness is we just suck. And the worst person to ask if they're an asshole. So when people ask me, so Bob, how big of an asshole are you? And I said 10% of the time, but I'm not to be trusted. 10%, yes. I could see that. What's your percentage, Michael?

My estimate of Bob's outlaw percentage? Of your own. That's much more reliable. Well, I don't know. I have to get back to on that. I think mine, his is lower than mine. Having been at least a situation. But this is an interesting test of your own self-awareness, right?

No, no, he's is lower than mine. I'm pretty sure. I think it has higher volatility. Oh, it's got a different character. Yeah, a little bit. A little bit. The upper end of the range is higher probably than Bob's, but. I don't know.

We've seen each other have moments. So this is not data-free. There's an interesting overlap, though, between the people who you mentioned in the early parts of the book about people who might just be too sensitive, that they might actually have a boss or a colleague that's just demanding, but they're thin skin. Yeah. Well, this is about context again and perspective, right? Totally, totally.

But what's interesting is their sensitivity is actually a great asset for them in sense of being empathetic to the other side, right? And Canary and the Coal Mine a little bit too. You mean for the whole culture, for the whole team? Yeah, because they'll spot a problem way before it actually gets to the level of intolerability. The thing, though, that I love about marrying Beck's techniques, which are really empathy-based, right? It's like, what does the worldview, the future expectations and self-image of somebody who behaves this way? I mean, sensitive people are actually really good at that.

And so they might actually be more capable than your average bear at coping and dealing with those situations via empathy and via basically saying, look, that person's yelling not about me. Right. It can't possibly be about me. They don't know me. I didn't cause the anger that's in their heart and just stepping back from it a little bit. That's why it's kind of my mantra into the book with, it's on you and we're not alone. The evidence that other people are so much better than ourselves at assessing a whole bunch of skills is just phenomenal.

In terms of self-awareness, the researchers who studied this essentially say don't look in the mirror, find some. somebody you know and trust and ask them, what do you think, was I an asshole? Is that person an asshole? So generally, not go up to them and be like, tell me, am I an asshole in my life? But like, was that situation? How did that go? It helps to have people who, you know, since we're in a venture capital firm, a good venture capitalist can do that. Not just with being an asshole, but with a whole bunch of other things is to deal with the lack of self-awareness. Right. Don't trust yourself. Go figure it out objectively, essentially, as objectively as you can. There's a bunch of formal interactions that people have at work. One example is board meetings, leave a space at the end,

particularly after a controversial or heavy, heavy discussion to say, look, I've given you my thoughts. I've tried to do it honestly, but I want you to know, I'm with you. Like, we're in this together. And putting that framing back around it to say, like, this is not adversarial, even if the conversation led to different opinions. It reminds me about my kids preschool, like, checking in. You know, after you have, it's the same thing after they have a conflict. like, let's check in with each other. Totally, yeah. That's a beautiful thing for psychological safety.

But if you create the rituals that are just, they're always on the agenda, the check in, the last wrapping up. That's a very good tip, yeah. That hygiene is really good for these relationships. And not just in the tense ones, but like regularly. I believe that the most effective human relationships are frank and actually can get conflict that to outsiders can look pretty ugly. But the difference is that when it's done in the context of I'm doing this in our collective

or your best interest, even though it doesn't always look that way, that's a completely different thing than I'm out to get you. You talk about this strategy, one particular strategy that's sort of counterintuitive of cognitive dissonance where you, and is this the same thing, where you kind of like meet aggressive assoliness behavior with kindness? Well, so it depends on the nature of the asshole. If somebody is, there's research on Machiavellian personality, classic Machiavellian personality, when you're nasty to me and I look afraid or I get angry, in some way I respond, it literally your brain lights up. It makes you feel good. You've accomplished your goal. But there's many other types of people who are nasty who aren't like that. But there's

very good evidence that if somebody does a favor for you, it's really hard for them to dislike you because of the two dissonant elements, which is, I don't like this person, but I'm doing a favor for him or her. So the implication is, your brain just literally doesn't like that. It doesn't like that. It doesn't. So that's one strategy. I call it the Benjamin Franklin effect because he did something like this as a young man with one of his haters where he got the guy to do him a favor. This person who had been the hater became a lifelong friend of his. Oh my gosh. That's interesting. It's funny. I hear in that story the importance of trade. You think about like when we've had breakthroughs as a country or as like a company. It's by doing business with other people. And if you can figure

out a way to either tune out, ignore, or just isolate yourself from the nonsense, and focus on the trade, the exchange. The transaction. I'm going to do this. I would like you to do that. Yeah. That transaction, that bank account starts to build. And I think over time, it becomes harder and harder. People say this about, you know, doing business, you know, back in the Cold War days, going to China, going to Russia, changed your perspective, and I'm sure it did for people who came from there to hear, change your perspective on, oh, these are people that I'm doing business with. It's not us against them. It's not black and white. It's much more balanced in your Well, it's funny that you say that because I feel like we sort of tend to think of transactional

as being a negative thing almost. Like, I take you give. But actually, there is something else that's being built. One of my favorite folks, I'm Adam Grant, who's at the University of Pennsylvania Wharton. He's got this great book called Give and Take, and essentially what he shows is people are most successful and like our givers. And the givers, especially over long periods of time, and the givers who succeed are the ones who don't get burned out and don't get exploited, mutual trade. And the other thing is when you work together cooperatively with someone that's really hard to dislike them. Yeah. Unless there, as Adam would say, unless they're total takers, and at every turn they've gotten their mind, I'm just going to scree. Well, and it just points to also

the importance of like respect and like going together, you know, because if you, even if you don't like somebody, if you start gradually respecting them, then eventually I think the dislike starts to get worn away. But it's, that's very different from what I, I thought you were talking about when you first talked about this cognitive dissonance, which was, I thought you were talking about something I heard on Invisibilia a while ago about there was an non-complementary behavior. There was somebody on talking about this dinner party where a burglar came in the middle of it and like, held them up. And they diffused the situation completely by offering him a glass of wine. And he ended up sort of like he sat quietly down and they talked a little bit. And at the end of the

night, he left and he left the glass of wine and the bottle like by the curb. Wow. It's like they broke the chain of events. There's actually all these studies. It can be very effective to just break the chain like that. That's what I thought, which is very different from building up transactions. So what are some of the other really practical ways on a daily level that you can sort of systematize this self-defense and protection. I love you mentioned the Allen curve. Like if you're dealing with an asshole at work, right? Well, this amazing research actually goes back to the 70s.

This guy, Tom Allen, did all this research to see how much people communicated. And he found out that essentially once you got more than 60 feet away from someone, and this was in a closed office environment, you might as well be in another country. Open offices assholes are really a problem because, like, you see this. them, you hear them. What this research shows is if you're within 25 feet of a toxic person, so what I would call an asshole, the chances you're going to become toxic and lose your job, go way up. No way. So for the good of your job, literally, back the fuck up. But the positive side is if you're near a star, the opposite happens. I had a terrible colleague,

not somebody that worked for me, but somebody a couple branches away in the org chart at eBay. person was awful. And I finally realized after taking years of nonsense from this person that this person actually had nothing to do with my life. Like this person couldn't say yes or no to anything I wanted. No actual impact. No, this person, well, other than negative. Right. And so I set up a filter that any email that came to my box that either had was from this person, cede this person or this person's name was mentioned in the body of the email. That's hilarious. That's a very wide net. Oh, yeah, I wasn't taking any freaking chances, would immediately be put in the trash. And so it was as if this person had left the company, even though this person was actually

still there. I mean, but did you not ever get tripped up by this? Like, this person coming down the hall, you know, somebody referring that? No. And that was the beautiful part of it. Like, I suspected that this person was utterly useless. And then it was turned out that it was true. And you proved it empirically. I did because I pretended that this person didn't exist. But not just directly useless. orthoginally useless as well. There was no, there were no useful surfaces at all. There was no edge of useful. Amazing.

Yeah. Now I use it on other people and I have a, I have a robust filter system in my email. So if people don't hear back from you, that might be a moment of self-analysis. Am I actually an asshole? I'm happy you're answering my emails. Within minutes, Bob, within minutes. Are there other ways in which you think about when you're running a business like physically situating people or how do you sort of, how does this get played out in an organizational

logistical level. So I had a boss when I worked at Disney, who was fanatical about which binder clips we used on our decks. Not real? Absolutely. And a genius guy, amazing talent, and had a real problem if you used the wrong-sized binder clip on a presentation or a pack of papers. So it was about, wait, I need to know more about this. It was about the size of the binder clip. Size and placement.

It was the source of being yelled at multiple times for me and my colleague. And so finally one day I said to him kind of in a, when he was in a good mood, I said, you know, the binder clip thing. What's up with that? And he said, oh, well, it's because people waste too much time figuring out why did you staple it? Why are these stapled differently? Are they different decks or like, it takes somebody too long to reposition it? So I want them in the same place, the right size every time so that people don't waste their time on that stuff. That was like, a moment of clarity for me. It was like, oh, I want those binder clips set that way, too, because I don't want people wasting their time on the nonsense. I want to get into the good stuff. So you understood his motivation. I did. And I was something like totally cool with it. Oh, that's interesting. And so I think a shock absorber for managers is when you know that it sounds like what you're saying might be a little unreasonable, just give a two-sentence explanation for the context. The reason I care about the sodas being arranged in grids is because I want it to look like people care

about the state of this kitchen. Stupid things have real reasons behind them. And sometimes you might decide you change your mind after you explain why the wacky thing sets you off. But I think it's better to be honest. There's also one other thing I subtext for me that one of the big themes about being slow to label people as assholes. Because in this case, because you're describing this specific behavior by somebody who

was generally okay other than that, sort of forgiving and understanding one another's quirks. You shouldn't just damn a whole person just because they have one strange quirker. They have a temper tantrum now and then. And I do think that both some forgiveness and understanding goes a long way. Well, and I think it's interesting that you talk about like what you as a manager can do. Because I also wanted to ask about are there different ways of handling assholes at different levels? You know, that have to because the whole power dynamic, your tactics have to change. Oh, absolutely.

So if you've got an asshole, there's three things. power, you have more or less power about the same. Yeah. And you got to be careful because people overestimate their power. The second one is, are you alone or can you kind of have a posse? And then, and then the third thing is how well documented is it? I thought it was great that you said, like, we all actually know how important that is and what a difference it can make, but not, we, we just don't do it. Anyways. For the power stuff, essentially, if you are going against somebody who is more powerful versus less powerful, it has a huge effect. You've got to document more carefully. You've got to get more allies. You've got to find ways to protect yourself. Whereas if you're the CEO, so one of the guys,

Paul Purcell, and he was CEO for years, W.R. Baird, now called Baird Financial Services firm, they have a no-asshole rule. He tells people during the interview, if I find out you're an asshole, I'm going to fire you. And he can do it because he's the boss. It's a lot different if you're not the boss. I think in some of those big power gap situations, cultivating your other options and building networks outside the firm, hugely important. And it's amazing how actually doing that of course is a good practical route to another situation. But it changes how you approach the situation you're in. It changes your like composure and your sensibility because it's doing something cognitive too. It's like giving you that almost that time travel distance. I felt like you

were kind of describing an ecosystem of assholery. There was also this like these different roles that people play like the idea of a toxic enabler. A lot of times many of us get in situations where we aren't the asshole, but it's kind of like after the parade comes to town, we clean up the crap. And I always say, by the way, if you were going to be an effective asshole, get yourself a toxic handler. Oh my gosh. That's such a sad thing to say. I'm just telling you to calm people, people down, to clean up the mess, to tell them that it really wasn't that bad. And most effective toxic enablers have one or more people like that, people who clean up the mess. Because a smart asshole almost always, even a dumb asshole might have one. And, and, and, and, and, you know, and

And so it's sort of unavoidable. But the idea that people in management positions, part of their job is to take the crap so that people can actually perform their work. To me, that's an important management function. That's true. But I wondered, like, how much a lot of these kind of coping mechanisms that you describe are the more kind of defensive, protective. How much of that is enabling versus, you know, I mean. Being a toxic enabler is it's a moral choice. And to me, it might be because you think that there's a greater good or maybe you can actually turn the person around or just maybe that's something that you're good at.

But the premise behind having the fixer is that the net return on having that person in the company or in your team or whatever is positive. The greater good. And I think that, I mean, he's got to be constantly measuring that ROI and being really comfortable sending up a red flag saying, hey, look, we're like on the negative side here. We've got to throw some positives into this because this is not working. There's people in life, and this is a different sort of assholes. We're talking about more powerful ones. And this is the kind of asshole that actually I have kind of an obsession with, petty tyrants. And there's really good research that in general with human beings, if you put them in a position where they have some power over people, but they don't have prestige, they're not esteemed.

Oh, if you separate those two things. And they do this experimentally and they do this in the lab in the field. And it turns out that having power without having stature or respect. So you think of somebody at the DMV who right now I'm dealing with a social service agency or prison guard. Prison guard. They have a lot of power. In the lab, you can turn somebody into a vindictive jerk. It's a really interesting angle to take on this is like maybe the root cause of a lot of this bad behavior is status anxiety.

Yeah. They're just trying to make sure they don't land on the bottom. Well, isn't that just a human? I mean, asshole equals insecure. Excuse me for being so, but there's always an element. I think there's a lot to that. And I don't think we're going to get that out of the human operating system anytime soon. I'm going to ask one last big question, which is, do you think we're in a time of more assholery?

You said the amount of research on what is on disrespectful behavior and has grown enormously. There's literally hundreds of thousand peer reviewed studies. Is that because we're behaving more like that? My current, it's hypothesis. I think we're at peak asshole. Now, right now. 2017, the year of peak asshole. If you look at what will turn human beings into disrespectful, nasty people,

it's having status differences. Powered status differences, really inequality of all kinds does that to people on both sides. Envy up, scorn down, happens. Yeah, that makes sense. When people are in a hurry, when people are crowded. So I think flying airplanes are sort of an analogy for this. You got first class, you got people are crowded. You got people who are in a hurry role models.

We've got some pretty bad role models in industry and in politics right now. And the web, by the way, has a lot to do with both sides of it. When we have communication, even with people aren't strangers who, when we don't have eye contact, we tend to be less empathetic and more nasty. But then there's this other side, which are these countervailing forces, which is, well, when you're bad, you're called out on, you're called out about. public scale. The visibility is like nothing we've ever seen before. For example, I talk about in this book, for the first time, part of the way that hospitals are evaluated for accreditation

in the United States, it's called the Joint Commission, is that if there's a hostile workplace, you in theory can lose your license. I don't think it's ever happened. It's valued. I have a non-hostile. Yeah. One thing, since we're in Silicon Valley right now, one thing that I actually really admire and I think will be good for all of us is essentially the movement against sexism, sexual harassment, and so on. The companies I tend to know that tend to have those problems tend to just have bad cultures where it's not the only problem. I think to your point that the sensitivity or awareness of how bad this is has never been higher. The visibility level, transparency, never been higher. The barrier to communicating about it, never been lower.

And so, you know, add all those things up, it's going to feel like a barrage of bad behavior. And I think it's, you know, listen, we're in a transitional time for pretty much everything with respect to how we treat each other or how the definition of bad behavior is changing. So I think it's a good time to be you with this book. And on that note, thank you both so much for joining us on the A16D podcast. Thanks for the invite.