Something You Should Know - Mysteries of the Human Body & Why You Should Know What Your Coworkers Earn

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Starting point is 00:00:34 fragrance you often smell in beauty products? What is it? Actually, we often don't know. Then, mysteries of the human body. Why do we get headaches? Why do we itch? Why do we yawn? Is it to get more oxygen? You've just hit on one of the common misconceptions about yawning, which is that we do it to get in more oxygen. In fact, we don't. So what we do know about yawning is that we tend to do it at times of behavioral transitions. Also, why we universally love cute things. And there's a really good reason you should know what your co-workers get paid, but you likely have no idea. Interestingly, when we look at the data, people tend to overestimate what their peers and what people underneath them in

Starting point is 00:01:19 a hierarchy are getting paid. And they overestimate that and they underestimate what their manager gets paid. But this is worse than it sounds. All this today on Something You Should Know. Bumble knows it's hard to start conversations. Hey. No, too basic. Hi there. Still no. What about hello, handsome? Who knew you could give yourself the ick?

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Starting point is 00:02:10 Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hi, welcome to Something You Should Know. Have you ever looked at a bottle of shampoo or on a perfume, looked at the ingredients list and seen in that list something that says fragrance. Well, that's pretty vague. And it could be trouble, according to an organization called Campaign for Safe Cosmetics. You see, some brands, not all, but some brands of scented products use cheap synthetic chemicals that can trigger headaches, wheezing, asthma,

Starting point is 00:02:46 and skin problems. Now, to protect their formulas, fragrance manufacturers are protected by trade secret laws, so they're not required to list ingredients individually. In the U.S. and many other countries, brands are supposed to make sure that their ingredients are safe. But here in the U.S., for example, they don't have to get FDA approval ahead of time. They're just supposed to play by those rules. The International Fragrance Association and the Research Institute for Fragrance Materials develop and set voluntary standards for the chemicals that make up fragrance, and the U.S., Canada, and Europe rely on them. But basically, it's all a self-regulated industry.

Starting point is 00:03:31 And just because a product is expensive doesn't necessarily mean it is free of some of these chemicals. The safest bet is to go fragrance-free, but if that's not an option, look for products with natural ingredients that are listed rather than catch-all terms like fragrance. And that is something you should know. Your body is a miracle. It does so many amazing things. It sometimes does strange and unusual things. And a lot of the things the body does, we don't necessarily understand.

Starting point is 00:04:09 Or we've been told stories of how and why, for instance, we get bad breath, or why people get headaches, or go bald, or why we yawn or itch. And sometimes what we've been told isn't really true. Here to set the record straight and tell you some fascinating stories about your body is Dr. Sarah Halper. She is a neurology doctor in Australia, and she's author of the book, What's Wrong With You? An Insider's Guide to Your Insides. Welcome, Sarah. Thanks for being here. Thanks, Mike. Lovely to be here.

Starting point is 00:04:43 So explain why you tackled this, why you decided to write about all of these things. What was the spark? Everyone is fascinated by their body, how it works and why it goes wrong. But the problem is, unless you go to medical school, you're never really taught how your body works or how to interpret common medical symptoms. Like before I went to med school, I had no idea where my spleen was. I don't think I even knew that I had a spleen, let alone what it did. So I found this, you know, what most of my patients want isn't a diagnosis in Latin. It's an explanation in English about what's wrong with them, what's actually going on inside their body that's making them feel sick.

Starting point is 00:05:24 Where is your spleen and what does it do? Excellent follow-up question. Your spleen is probably the most pretty organ in the body. It's bright purple and it sits just to the side on the left-hand side below your lower ribs. You can live without a spleen, but it's best to keep it in there because it's important for protecting your body against certain bacterial infections. So it's part of your immune system. So let's talk about bad breath, because everybody's experienced it. They've either had it or they've had it blown at them. What is it?

Starting point is 00:06:02 Absolutely. Is it a problem or is it just part of being a person well i think you've identified it it is a social problem but what's interesting is that it wasn't really considered a social problem until the 1920s so the fascinating uh story is the history of listerine now listerine was initially released as a multi-purpose product at the end of the 1800s. And when I say multi-purpose, Mike, I'm not kidding. So it was originally spruced as a floor cleaner, an aftershave, a deodorant, and even, get this, a treatment for gonorrhea. So you sort of bathe your genitals in it. Now, it didn't really work doing any of those things, and it

Starting point is 00:06:42 wasn't selling very well. So what the marketing people at Listerine decided was that they needed a massive rebranding. They had to remarket this product as something that would sell. So what they did is they decided to sell it as this medical cure for bad breath. So they released this huge advertising campaign framing bad breath not just as a social problem but this disease and they gave it this latin greek name halitosis which means sort of bad air so when they remarketed their product as this medical cure their sales went through the roof and they had these shameless advertisements saying are you unpopular with your own children and um there was the phrase always a bridesmaid, but never a bride,

Starting point is 00:07:26 was invented by Listerine to try and say, the reason you are not successful is because of your bad breath. Buy our product and your problem will be solved. So really, Listerine created a problem and they were the solution. Although, you know, I've never liked the taste of Listerine but still I mean people are worried about bad breath and no one likes to smell it so what do you do about it? It's not necessarily a fait accompli it can be treated and the best way to reduce the risk of having bad breath is to clean your teeth and remove the food particles that are trapped between your teeth. So if we actually think about where's that smell really coming from, it's from bacteria that are living in the crevices between your teeth and on your tongue and around your gums. And they feed on food particles that

Starting point is 00:08:15 are trapped in those locations. And so how does mouthwash work? I mean, I assume, I've always thought that it was the alcohol in Listerine or any other mouthwash that you put in your mouth and that's what kills the germs. So interestingly, it's not the alcohol that kills the germs. It's actually these essential oils in it. So there's essential oils from thyme, eucalyptus, wintergreen and mint. And that's what gives Listerine its antiseptic properties, not the ethanol, because to have antiseptic properties, alcohol needs to be at least 60% concentrated. And it's only about 25% concentration in Listerine. And it's really only there just to dissolve those essential oils.

Starting point is 00:08:55 So that's why Listerine releases, I think, alcohol-free versions of it, and it still works as a mouthwash. But you're completely right that the medicalization of a previously sort of low-key issue that no one really talked about is what allowed them to sell their products. Something I think people believe to be important is urine, that you can tell things by your urine, the color of your urine somehow reflects something about your health. So talk about that. So urine was actually the first bodily fluid to be scientifically examined, which sort of makes sense because if you don't have CT scanners, you can't really do blood tests. It's the most readily accessible fluid. There's a few liters of it coming out of your patients every day. So

Starting point is 00:09:40 having a look at it and trying to infer medical problems upstream, as it were, sort of makes sense. And if we look at clay tablets from physicians in Babylon, over 6,000 years ago, they're talking about looking at urine to diagnose problems. These days, we have a bit more of a balanced approach to looking at urine. And under very specific circumstances, it can be used to diagnose diseases. So for example, we know that people with uncontrolled diabetes, glucose or sugar in the blood can spill out into the urine and it can result in urine that's quite sweet to taste. Not that I would recommend that you taste it. Other things that you can tell by your urine is, for example, if you've ingested any drugs, a lot of the drugs that you can snort or smoke or inject end up in your urine.

Starting point is 00:10:27 But is there any kind of rule of thumb like, you know, it's best if your urine is as close to clear as possible or that really dark urine means something else or not? Excellent question. So the color of urine should be yellow and the degree of how yellow it is can tell you it's a pretty rough rule of thumb about how hydrated you are. So really it should just be a pale yellow and any other colour could be a sign of disease. So for example beeturia is when your urine appears red and this affects about 10% of the population after eating beetroot. So the pigment can end up in your urine. A more common cause for red urine

Starting point is 00:11:09 would be if there's blood in your urine, which could come from something quite serious, like a bladder cancer. There are certain drugs that we can prescribe patients that make your urine go all the colours of the rainbow. So rifampicin, which is a drug that's used to treat tuberculosis, makes all of your body

Starting point is 00:11:25 fluids bright orange. If people take high dose vitamin B supplements, your urine can go fluoro yellow, like really bright yellow. And that's because you're urinating out the excess B vitamins. There's heaps of other examples. So Michael Jackson, for example, he died from an overdose of the anesthetic propofol. And propofol can make your urine turn bright pink or this awful kind of mossy green or even white. So urine, because it's really, as Hippocrates said, just a filtrate of the sort of junk products of your body, depending on what things you put into your body, your urine's color can change. So it should be yellow, a light yellow. Anything else, maybe see a doctor. I don't know why exactly, but I've always found itching to be something really interesting

Starting point is 00:12:09 because it doesn't seem to serve much of a purpose. It's really annoying. It's always in spots you can't reach, and it's always when you're trying to fall asleep and all of a sudden you get this itch. And also, I'm sure now that we're going to talk about it, I'm going to start itching, because when you talk about itching, you itch. So what is it? So itching is one of these sensations. It's sort of like yawning, or there's a few other examples of behaviors that we don't really know why we do it, but we can sort of have a bit of a guess. And looking at evolution is often a useful way of guessing about these things.

Starting point is 00:12:49 So what itch does is it draws your attention to irritants on your skin. So if you think about the things that make you itch, like, you know, mosquito landing on your skin or the itchy woolen sleeve of a jumper you're wearing, it's really the itch sensation is a way that your brain draws your attention to something that might break your skin. And the skin is so important to keeping infection out of your body. Any wounds that you have, even little abrasions, can be a site of entry for bacteria. So by having this sort of itch scratch behavior that's very finely tuned and sensitive

Starting point is 00:13:25 means that we can you know dislodge anything that might otherwise be invading our skin barrier but really if you're feeling an itch at night Mike there's three main things that might be causing it something wrong with your skin so something touching your skin maybe your sheets are a bit too rough a chemical that's causing you to be itchy in your skin, so like poison ivy, for example, you might be familiar with. Other chemicals like the stuff that's in mosquito saliva makes you itch. And the third cause could be your brain. Your brain can generate itch all by itself. Well, but I bet you there are a lot of times that we feel an itch that we don't really notice it because something else is going on. We notice itches like when we're lying in bed because that's all we're doing.

Starting point is 00:14:12 And I've noticed that itches are contagious. I mean, just as I said, talking about this makes me itch. It's a very insightful observation that you've made there, Mike, because itch is one of these behaviours that is contagious, just like yawning. So if you think about itching, when I was writing the chapter on itching, I was itching so much. And it's thought again that this is an evolutionary hangover. So if I see you itching, it tells me, oh, gosh, maybe Mike has got some nits or he's got some lice on him. And if I start itching almost subconsciously, it's going to decrease the chance of me getting that infestation because I'm preemptively itching before I'm even infected. Our topic today is, well, I guess it's bodily functions

Starting point is 00:14:59 and how your body works. My guest is Dr. Sarah Holper, and she is author of the book What's Wrong With You? An Insider's Guide to Your Insides. This is an ad for BetterHelp. Welcome to the world. Please, read your personal owner's manual thoroughly. In it, you'll find simple instructions for how to interact with your fellow human beings and how to find happiness and peace of mind. Thank you, and have a nice life. Unfortunately, life doesn't come with an owner's manual.

Starting point is 00:15:30 That's why there's BetterHelp Online Therapy. Connect with a credentialed therapist by phone, video, or online chat. Visit BetterHelp.com to learn more. That's BetterHelp.com. People who listen to something you should know are curious about the world, looking to hear new ideas and perspectives. So I want to tell you about a podcast that is full of new ideas and perspectives, and one I've started listening to, called Intelligence Squared.

Starting point is 00:15:59 It's the podcast where great minds meet. Listen in for some great talks on science, tech, politics, creativity, wellness, and a lot more. A couple of recent examples, Mustafa Suleiman, the CEO of Microsoft AI, discussing the future of technology. That's pretty cool. And writer, podcaster, and filmmaker John Ronson discussing the rise of conspiracies and culture wars. Intelligence Squared is the kind of podcast that gets you thinking a little more openly about the important conversations going on today. Being curious, you're probably just the type of person Intelligence Squared is meant for. Check out Intelligence Squared wherever you get your podcasts. So, Sarah, you mentioned yawning is kind of in that same category as

Starting point is 00:16:46 we're not really sure, but why aren't we sure? I mean, people associate yawning with being tired or lack of oxygen or something, but really we don't know why we do it? No, and you've just hit on one of the common misconceptions about yawning, which is that we do it to get in more oxygen. In fact, we don't. And there was a very neat study that was done about 50 years ago now, where people were given, they were either told to inhale pure oxygen or diluted oxygen, so with a lot more carbon dioxide, and their yawning rates were measured. And there is absolutely no difference to the yawning rates when you're breathing in pure oxygen or quite low oxygen air. So you'd think that if we needed to

Starting point is 00:17:30 yawn to get in more oxygen, you know, we should essentially stop yawning if we're breathing in 100% oxygen and we should yawn and yawn and yawn if the oxygen content of what we're breathing is low and that simply isn't the case. So what we do know about yawning is that we tend to do it at times of behavioral transitions. So going from awake to sleepy at night, vice versa in the morning, but also transitions like going from calm to anxious. So paratroopers tend to yawn when they're about to go on their first skydive. If you're watching the Olympics and you see an athlete next to the track, they're often yawning. In fact, some athletes have been criticized in the media saying, oh, you know, he didn't even get a good night's sleep. He's yawning before his race.

Starting point is 00:18:09 No, it's because he's about to go into this transition to prepare for a big activity. In fact, the TSA in America, they had this checklist of behaviours that might indicate that a person was a terrorist at an airport. And there were all these behaviours on it, like, you know, wearing a mask or having a disguise on. But one of the suspicious behaviours was yawning. And that's because we know that when people are anxious, if they're about to commit a crime, for example, they tend to yawn more. So yawning is this mysterious behaviour that somehow perks up the brain to prepare it for a new activity, be it falling asleep, waking up or committing a crime, for example. Let's talk about headaches because I'm sure there's not a soul alive who hasn't had a headache and wondered, why is my head aching?

Starting point is 00:18:56 If you think about what actually causes a headache, the weird thing is, Mike, that the brain itself can't feel pain. So what I mean by that is that if I were to crack open your skull, which would hurt a lot, if I were to actually touch your brain or use a scalpel in it, you wouldn't feel it. So then the logical question is, well, if your brain can't feel pain, what on earth is happening when you have a headache? Because it feels like your brain's hurting.

Starting point is 00:19:20 In fact, the pain is coming from structures around the brain that certainly are pain sensitive. So if we have a quick anatomy 101, your brain is about three pounds in weight and it's very soft. So 75% water. It's like the consistency of, you know, that soft silken tofu that you can buy that sort of rips apart. It's like that. If you put a fresh brain on a table, it sort of just sags and it can tear just from gravity itself. So to maintain structural integrity within your skull, it needs to have quite a lot of support structures to keep it together. And one of those main support structures are what's called your meninges. So there's lining sort of like cling film around

Starting point is 00:20:00 your brain. And the outermost lining of those cling film meninges has a lot of pain receptors. So if your brain, for example, slightly shrinks when you're dehydrated, it can tug on those linings around it. It can cause a headache. Tension in the muscles in your neck or your face or your jaw, that can cause a headache as well because there's certainly pain receptors

Starting point is 00:20:20 in all of those muscles. So really when you have a headache, it's not your brain that's aching, It's structures around your brain and head and neck that are causing the headache in most cases. What about a brain freeze or some people call it an ice cream headache? Is that really a headache? And what is it exactly? The fancy term for that is sphenopalatine ganglioneuralgia, which is really just a brain freeze headache in Latin. And the reason you might experience that is that when the cold liquid gushes into your mouth, it rapidly cools the blood that's running through the vessels in the roof of your

Starting point is 00:20:57 mouth. And when the vessels experience that sudden temperature drop, the vessels squeeze tight and then rapidly reopen. And that rebounds dilatation triggers pain receptors that are in your palate there. So if you press your warm tongue right up to the roof of your mouth, usually that gives enough heat to swiftly relieve the pain. Talk about balding, because that's certainly a concern for many men, and I guess some women too, that losing your hair is not something to look forward to. Balding has been something that's tormented mainly men, as you say, for centuries. So Julius Caesar, for example, as his empire was expanding, his hairline was rapidly receding

Starting point is 00:21:36 and he hated it. So in all of these Roman documents, it mentions that he considered it a disfigurement that really troubled him. And he used to comb his hair forward in the earliest example of a comb over. And then as he lost more and more hair, he resorted to wearing a laurel wreath, which covered his receding hairline. And before Caesar, usually people only wore a laurel wreath when they were having a big ceremony, so a few times a year. But Caesar took to wearing it every single day

Starting point is 00:22:05 because it hid his receding hairline. And in the centuries since, people have resorted to other techniques like comb-overs and backwards baseball caps and things to hide their receding hairline. As to why it happens, well, we can blame it on steroid hormones called androgens. So in your body, you have hormones that are classified as steroid hormones, that's just a comment about their chemical structure, but androgen examples would be

Starting point is 00:22:32 things like testosterone, that's the most commonly known androgen. Men and women have androgens circulating in their blood but men have a much higher concentration of androgens than women. Now androgens tend to surge around the time of puberty and what androgens than women. Now, androgens tend to surge around the time of puberty. And what androgens do in general is to beef things up. So your muscles grow, your vocal cords grow, your sebaceous glands grow, which is why I get acne around the time of puberty. And your hair follicles also grow as a result of androgens. So the transition from sort of wispy hairs in your underarms to those thick, dark hairs during puberty, that's from androgens effect on hair follicles.

Starting point is 00:23:11 So what I've just said there, that androgens make hair follicles beef up, that doesn't quite make sense then if we think about balding. Because if men have more androgens and androgens make hair follicles beef up, why then would men go bald? Surely they should keep on growing these luxurious locks because of the effect of androgens. Not so. And the maddening thing is that for some reason, androgens have the opposite effect on hair follicles on the scalp. So instead of making the hair follicles go into overdrive and produce these thick extra hairs that men have on their chest and their back, on the scalp, androgens cause the hair follicles to shrivel up and to miniaturize. That's the actual medical term. And we call this the androgen paradox.

Starting point is 00:23:58 Now, it's unclear why the scalp follicles have this opposite reaction to androgens, but it underscores the reason why hair transplants work. If you transplant a hair follicle from a man's beard to his scalp, it will keep on growing because the beard follicles, like the follicles over the rest of a man's body, love androgens and thrive on them. What about jet lag? Why do we have such trouble, and some more than others, when we cross time zones and it messes up our schedule? But why is it so hard to adjust? Yeah, so jet lag is really a modern problem that's only cropped up since humans have been able to travel quickly between time zones. So to understand jet lag, we need to understand circadian rhythms.

Starting point is 00:24:42 So circadian, the word itself means about a day. And it's a deliberately vague term, you know, about a day, because it's not actually 24 hours that we have these biological cycles like sleep and wake. It's actually 24.2 hours. So for millions of years, we've been evolving to have these circadian rhythms. And then suddenly we introduced jet flight, you know, in the middle of last century century and we're suddenly flicking between time zones now our body clock has never had to rapidly adjust to new time zones because we've never been able to travel fast enough to warrant that sort of reaction so when we do go on a plane and go to a new time zone suddenly our body is you know it thinks that we should be asleep,

Starting point is 00:25:28 but it's the middle of the day and you're eating a baguette next to the Eiffel Tower. So these hormones, all of these beautifully titrated patterns of biology that are happening within your body are completely scrambled. And that's why you feel so crummy. But you adjust quickly, or some people do. Some people adjust quicker than others. Exactly right. So the time to adjust is quite variable between different people. And the easiest way to reset is with light. So exposing yourself to really bright light when you want to be awake and making sure that you switch off the lights when you're trying to be asleep, that is the best way to reset the clock. Okay, so I know this is not the most delicate of subjects,

Starting point is 00:26:09 but what about throwing up? Because I don't know anyone who hasn't, and it is kind of weird when it happens. So what's going on there? Everything about vomiting is disgusting. So thinking about it, the smell of it, the taste of it. In fact, there's a chemical that's in vomit called butyric acid, and it's the same chemical that's in Parmesan cheese. So there's been these experiments where if you get someone to smell Parmesan cheese and tell them it's vomit, they think the Parmesan

Starting point is 00:26:41 cheese is disgusting. But vice versa, if you get them to smell vomit and say it's cheese, they go, oh, gosh, that's a lovely, you know, meaty flavor. So putting that aside, let's have a think about nausea. So that feeling like you need to spew. So usually, the first thing that you feel is extra saliva that pools in your mouth. And the reason that your body makes that happen is that it protects your teeth. The contents of your stomach is quite acidic. And if that contacts the enamel in your teeth, it can cause a bit of damage. So the extra saliva that pulls in your mouth is a way to protect the teeth. Now, just before you vomit, you take in reflexively this really deep breath, and that stops you from accidentally inhaling whilst you're vomiting. Because if you breathe

Starting point is 00:27:23 in vomit, all of those bacteria-laden chunks of semi-digested food entering your lungs is a recipe for disaster and pneumonia. The next step is coordination within the gut itself. So your small intestine starts squeezing backwards from about midway along its length and And as it starts squeezing backwards, your abs tighten to help the contents head up back north. So you've got high pressure in your abdomen, you've got low pressure in your chest because you just took in that big breath, and that combination helps force the contents of the vomit upwards through your stomach, and then all of the contents are propelled out through your mouth. So a lot of complex choreography to coordinate all of those different motor activities within your gut. And the bit of your brain that does that is called the vomiting center, which sounds like an awful kind of mall where you go and buy vomit or something. But it's not a shopping center. It's a vomiting coordination of neuron center that helps to coordinate all of

Starting point is 00:28:27 those breathing and gut activities that are needed to get the stuff out of your guts. Well, that truly is disgusting. And, you know, there's, we're out of time, but there's so much more that we could talk about of the strange things the body does. Maybe you can come back someday and we'll do part two. Dr. Sarah Holper has been my guest. She's a neurology doctor and she's based in Australia. And the name of her book is What's Wrong With You? An Insider's Guide to Your Insides. And there's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thank you, Sarah. This has been fun. I agree. Thank you. That was great fun.

Starting point is 00:29:10 Since I host a podcast, it's pretty common for me to be asked to recommend a podcast. And I tell people, if you like something you should know, you're going to like The Jordan Harbinger Show. Every episode is a conversation with a fascinating guest. Of course, a lot of podcasts are conversations with guests, but Jordan does it better than most. Recently, he had a fascinating conversation with a British woman who was recruited and radicalized by ISIS and went to prison for three years. She now works to raise awareness on this issue. It's a great conversation. And he spoke with Dr. Sarah Hill about how taking birth control not only prevents pregnancy, it can influence a woman's partner preferences, career choices,

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Starting point is 00:30:21 I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle. On every episode of our fun and family-friendly show, we count down our top 10 lists of all things Disney. There is nothing we don't cover. We are famous for rabbit holes, Disney-themed games, and fun facts you didn't know you needed, but you definitely need in your life. So if you're looking for a healthy dose of Disney magic, check out Disney Countdown wherever you get your podcasts. As you know, it is considered rather rude and crude to talk about how much money you make, or to ask someone else how much money they make. But why? Why is money so secretive? The theory is that, well, it's really none of your business what other people make,

Starting point is 00:31:07 including what the people you work with make. But humans being human, when we don't know something like that, we speculate, we imagine, and we talk amongst ourselves. And all of this can lead to problems in an organization and amongst team members in that organization. David Berkus is an organizational psychologist who gave an interesting TED Talk on why we should know what others make, and he is an expert on how successful teams within an organization function.

Starting point is 00:31:38 He's also author of a book called Leading from Anywhere, and he's here to talk about all this. Hi, David, welcome. Oh, thank you so much for having me. So before we get into the reasons why you should know what other people make, let's first talk about why it's so taboo in the first place. I would say it depends on whether or not you want to get conspiratorial or you just want to attribute it to culture, right? We definitely have a culture in the West of

Starting point is 00:32:05 keeping that information private. Personally, I get a little conspiratorial. I think there's a massive economic advantage as well when companies can keep these things private and negotiate one to one with individuals as they come into an organization where they get to know what your past salary was, but you don't really get to know all that much about what they have to offer, what their range is, any of that sort of stuff until you get well into the negotiation. And even then, only if you're a good negotiator, right? So there's a couple of different things at play that have led to this recent history, relatively recent history, past couple of decades of this is a taboo topic. We're more likely to talk about all sorts of

Starting point is 00:32:45 areas of our personal life now before we share our salary, which is really quite weird and actually not what the data suggests in terms of getting people to collaborate better and be better members of a team, which is that transparency works better. So how does knowing what my co-workers make benefit me? The issue here is one of perceived fairness and also of motivation. So in the motivational literature, there's a whole body of research called equity theory that popularizes this idea that we judge how much effort we should put into an organization based on our perceived inputs and the reward compared to others, right? So it's the comparison part that makes us feel whether or not we're actually being paid fairly and therefore I should

Starting point is 00:33:30 go give more into the organization or whether we feel like we're being paid unfairly and I should adjust, right? A lot of the people who end up slacking off at work or putting in less than their best, a lot of times they're doing so because what they perceive is an injustice and so-and-so gets paid way more and they're a terrible worker, or even they get paid the same and they're a terrible worker. Therefore, I should sort of decrease my efforts, right? The big thing we're doing, where we're trying to do in making salaries transparent is that we're trying to let everybody in the organization know, this is how we determined who gets paid what, this is how we assign the value that you're bringing to the organization, how we assign a number at that. And we can debate the system that we use, but we want you to know that it's a level playing

Starting point is 00:34:13 field here, that everybody is getting paid the same or in an equitable fashion. That's why it's called equity theory. And as a result, that actually decreases some of those tensions, that feeling of being ripped off, et cetera, and increases people's motivation. Now, I'll say one thing here, which is that if you don't have an equitable system, transparency is a terrible idea. And this is where a lot of people, when I say, yeah, we should have a system in place where everybody knows at least how everyone's pay was determined, even if they don't know the exact numbers, is that right now, most organizations are paying people all over the place. I mean, differences of $10,000 or more based on how good someone negotiated three years ago when they joined the organization. And since the organization

Starting point is 00:34:54 can't defend that, they know that if they reveal what everybody gets paid, people are going to discover those inequities and all hell will break loose. So we don't want that, right? We want to move towards that fair system first. And that takes a couple of different forms of how we do that. And then we can get transparent. But if you're not, if you're just letting negotiations and how good someone was in the interview process, determine everybody's salary, don't get transparent. That's probably the worst thing you can do for morale in an organization. And if you're in one of those organizations, you may not want to know what your co-workers get paid. You may just want to look for a more transparent organization and go be successful in that company. In the absence of knowing what your co-workers make, what's your sense of what people tend to believe? Do they tend to believe that they're making less and maybe that's why they are not being told? What's the, in the vacuum of not knowing,

Starting point is 00:35:46 what's the go-to position? Interestingly, when we look at the data, what we see is that people tend to overestimate what their peers and what people underneath them in a hierarchy are getting paid. And they overestimate that and they underestimate what their manager gets paid, which is kind of the opposite of like the pop culture idea. Like we're all familiar with that idea of the Michael Scott, right? The overpaid and totally inept boss. But the reality is when you survey people, it's actually the opposite. They think that higher levels of the organization are actually underpaid, but this is worse than it sounds because if I'm going to take on all that extra responsibility and not get a significant salary bump, then what's the point? So you end up having people who are less motivated to commit to an organization in the long term because they see

Starting point is 00:36:29 those rewards because they're judging improperly. They don't have the actual information. Well, given that, let's say people are told or they find out what other people are making, how much difference in pay is tolerable before people think it's unfair? It depends on whether or not you can see a dramatic difference in performance, right? So for example, in a sales role, you can have a very wide gap between you and some other colleagues, right? Based on how much, I mean, we know the data on that. We know how many sales they did or at least their performance, et cetera. In more knowledge work, sort of harder to judge things in your support roles like accounting or HR, et cetera, then the gap is a lot more narrow, right? Typically,

Starting point is 00:37:15 what we see in organizations that are trying to convey what that difference is, we'll see them move to a system where they actually do salaries that are kind of banded. So this is what the federal government does, for example. You're a G1, G2, G3, and then they set a range inside that. And those ranges are in the single digit thousands most of the time, instead of these massive differences. You can have those massive differences in things like sales and other really high revenue producing jobs, but you can't really have them in other more support functions. Let's say I find out the guy in the cubicle next to me and it's the same job, but he's making more.

Starting point is 00:37:53 Is that a good reason to go in and ask for a raise because of that? I think it's a great reason if you can prove it, right? So if you can prove that we're contributing the same amount of value, right? And that the only difference is maybe that they negotiated better, et cetera. It's a good reason. I'll be honest, in a lot of situations, that complaint, that petition, et cetera, is going to fall on deaf ears. So the more common thing people do is they look to leave

Starting point is 00:38:20 the organization. They look to go find another company where they're going to get paid the same as Bob in the cubicle next to me for doing the same job. They just know they can get paid somewhere else. So that's where they go. And again, from an organizational standpoint, this is terrible. We would almost rather you force the issue than lose a great employee because of this perceived inequity that nobody brought up. Yeah. Well, that's going to be my next question. When employees threaten to leave because they think they're being paid unfairly, does the organization say, sure, go ahead, if you think you can do better somewhere else? Or do they look at it more as this, you know, we paid to train this guy and all this, and now we've got to replace him and let's find a way to keep him. So sometimes in the book that I pulled the content for the TED Talk out of, which is called Under New Management, I tell the story of Whole Foods and Whole Foods moving pre-Amazon acquisition.

Starting point is 00:39:15 Whole Foods moved to a transparent system because John Mackey was willing to engage everybody in these conversations and say, well, yeah, he gets paid $10,000 more, but here's his performance data. In fact, at Whole Foods, not only is your salary transparent, but your performance data is transparent as well. And so you could see that Bob in the cubicle next to you has paid 10 grand a year more than you, but also Bob's performance evaluations have been a lot higher for a lot longer than you. So if you have that situation, sometimes savvy leaders engage in that and move towards transparency to sort of show that. And that's not just to push back and slam employees because you had a perceived inequity. It's more to say, if you do these things, you can most organizations are kind of lazy. And so their approach is, yeah,

Starting point is 00:40:05 yeah, maybe you should. Good luck. Or they'll wait until you go get an offer and then they'll try and make a counteroffer. And actually, the data here is really clear. You should almost never accept a counteroffer because whatever it is that led you to go look for a job somewhere else, that problem is still going to be there in a year, even though you're getting paid more money. And so 90% or 95%, I forget the exact percentage, but it's overwhelming the amount of people who accept a counteroffer and leave within a year anyway. Right. So unfortunately, organizations choose to act a little too late a lot of times in these perceived inequities and they end up losing a lot of good people. When people have these discussions and, you know, I wonder what Bob makes and what Susie, you know, does this become a nagging problem that

Starting point is 00:40:51 doesn't go away or people talk about it and they get their frustrations out and then they get back to work and it kind of fades away. In the absence of clear data, we know that people continue to talk about it, right? New people come in and sometimes we can get a glimpse at what they got paid or somebody who was involved in the hiring process has a glimpse and then it gets into the rumor mill and depending on the size of the organization, it can wreak havoc. The difference here is an organization that's committed to transparency, these conversations actually fall away a lot faster. So I talk about the example of Sumall, which is now, I think they were acquired, or I'm not sure what happened with them, but they were about a 50, 60 person tech company that I

Starting point is 00:41:31 profiled in 2015. And they made the decision not to start as a transparent company, but to switch to it. And it was a big drama thing for about a week and a half, and then nobody cared. And so that tends to be what happens when you reveal that transparency is everybody's curious, what does Sally make? What does Michael make? Et cetera. But then in about a week, nobody really cares because they have access to the data. In the absence of data though, they start looking for little cues. They start wondering if they have the right number, rumor mills compound and compound and get, you know, if you've ever played a game of telephone, it's like that with some of these things. And so it's never really settled because we don't know the actual number. And so we keep just looking for clues and we keep the issue

Starting point is 00:42:09 always kind of lingering in the back. I mean, that's the irony. I get a lot of hate mail ever since the TED Talk came out from people who are like, salary is none of anybody's business except the individual and the employer. And I go, great. Yeah, you're exactly right. Then explain why everybody talks about it even when there's not information, right? This is not an issue people don't talk about. The difference here is I'm advocating that since people are talking about it, let's develop a system that pays people fairly, and then let's give them something to talk about. Because what does this do to the team? What does this do to the workforce in an organization, particularly people who work relatively closely together? Is this a big elephant in the room?

Starting point is 00:42:51 And if this isn't it, what are some of the other things that are getting in the way of teamwork? In the absence of good information, this can be an elephant in the room. We join a project team with somebody. They seem like a social loafer. We start to wonder, are they getting paid the same as me? Are they getting paid more than me? That would be atrocious because they're not contributing anything to this team, right? Versus when it's transparent, it moves into a system where we can really judge this. And we can understand that, you know what, actually maybe they are paid more, but they're

Starting point is 00:43:21 also on six other project teams. And that's why they seem like a social loafer on this. When we have access to the performance data and also the pay data, we see the explanations instead of making them up, which is the huge problem. This actually all flows into, and this is something I've been researching, started pre-COVID, kind of took a detour and researched a lot about remote teams because all of us were on remote teams for about 16 months. But it all speaks to what we in the psychology literature sometimes call shared understanding or common understanding, which is that a team gels when it has a high degree of common understanding. Meaning I know the knowledge, skills, and abilities. I know what everybody

Starting point is 00:43:59 is contributing. I also know their preferences. I know how they like to receive feedback. And pay is part of that in the sense that pay explains the broader situation, right? So I know that this person is paid this amount, so I expect a bigger contribution for them versus a smaller one, et cetera. All of that feeds into this element of shared understanding or common understanding that teams really need to develop in order to have good working relationships. If you think about every team you've ever been on where you have a positive working relationship with all of your coworkers, it's usually because you understood a lot about who they were and what they were bringing to the team.

Starting point is 00:44:33 And unfortunately, a lot of teams, especially in the last 16 months, never really go through that. We might call that the actual team building. We might call that the clicking on a team or gelling on a team or whatever. It's that building of common understanding. And so when you look at teams that you work with and the research on all of this, the things that make teams work well and the things that make teams not work well, what are they? What's the top 10 list on both of those lists? Or maybe not 10, but-

Starting point is 00:45:06 Yeah, 10 is a lot. I'll give you three because I tend to settle on these three. The first we already talked about, which is that sense of common understanding or shared understanding. Do I actually know the people I'm working with? Do I know who's an expert in what? And as a result, we have a way better system for divvying up tasks than just guessing or waiting to see who volunteers? Do I know their preferences, how they like to receive feedback? Do I know them enough to know that that vague statement was actually a request for help, right? Or do I know how to offer them help in a way that doesn't necessarily offend them if they're trying to save face, right? All of that funnels into that common understanding or shared understanding. The next big piece that makes teams

Starting point is 00:45:45 thrive is what I would call a sense of pro-social purpose. What the researchers like, there's a great study called Project Aristotle. It was a study of teams at Google. They might call meaning and impact, right? What I mean when I say pro-social purpose is not only that we have a purpose, that our team is working on a project that has a purpose, but also that I can identify who is helped, who the internal or external customer is, who the stakeholders, whose lives are being made better. We can identify that very, very clearly on a team. And there's agreement about the purpose of being on this team and what we're actually working for. And the third and final piece is the sense of psychological safety. In other words, I can bring my whole self to this team. I can speak up when I disagree and not feel that I'm going to be judged or kicked out or siloed.

Starting point is 00:46:29 I can express that dissent and feel heard. We can have task-focused conflict conversations because we respect each other enough. All of that feeds into that psychological safety piece. And those are really the three pieces, this common understanding, psychological safety, and pro-social purpose or a pro-social goal. morning in the same place and we work together or we were down the hall or whatever. Now people are staying home, but some people are coming in and some people are coming in a few days a week. How does that all change? Yeah. And so what we found over the last 16 months, we engaged in this great work from home experiment and we found a couple of different things. We found that remote work and working from home works, but not for everyone, right? And the big challenge for organizations is figuring out who wants to come back, how often we want them back, how often we need them back,

Starting point is 00:47:30 who wants more flexibility, how we can give them that flexibility. And I'll be honest, I don't have great answers here. Other than that, a one-size-fits-all organization-wide policy won't work as well as a team coming to agreement on what their own team policy is going to be. But the common understanding is the big thing I'm worried about over the next six to 12 months is because some people are wanting to work from home and others are working from the office, et cetera, are we doing enough to communicate that we are all still working no matter where we are? And are we having enough touch points to where we still know what each other are working on on a regular basis? And we still feel like we know those people as a team, or do we develop this in-group out-group thing where all the people

Starting point is 00:48:13 who are back five days a week or even four days a week feel like their own little click and they just have to mandatorily collaborate with the remote, the people who prefer the remote work. That's a recipe for disaster. That's a recipe for a lot of really talented people who want more flexibility, feeling like they don't have a long-term future in the organization, et cetera. And that would be my warning for a lot of individuals, right? If you're in that sense that you want to be working remotely a lot more, three or four days a week and coming to the office only one day a week, you're going to need to make sure that people understand you, what you're working on, that you understand the team. You're going to need to be broadcasting what you're working on very often because I don't trust your average manager to navigate this very

Starting point is 00:48:52 well. And so you almost need to be your own advocate if you decide that what you want is a long-term future in that organization. Because what I worry about is a year from now, we have a flexible work policy, but all the people who get promoted seem to be the ones that are at the office four to five days a week. Right. Because those people who stay at home, who want to work from home, I think are viewed by the people who go into the office four or five days a week as being maybe less committed or just less part of the team because they're at home. They didn't leave their home to come to work. So they're not quite what we are. Yeah, no. And the irony here is that at least pre-pandemic, right, the research supported the opposite, that people who were

Starting point is 00:49:39 working from home or working remotely more often were more productive. I mean, I, again, in that book, Under New Management, I had another chapter talking about the open productive. I mean, I, again, in that book under new management, I had another chapter to talk about the open office as early as 2014, 2015, we started seeing the data that everybody eventually agreed at, right? By 2018, 2019, everybody hated their open office, but the data was there almost five years before that. These are distraction factories, that these raise people's stress levels, that they were germ factories. People were more likely to be sick by being at those. And as I would talk about that book, people would pull me to the side and go, yeah, you're exactly right. That's why I got a library card for that library around the corner.

Starting point is 00:50:11 I always go to this coffee shop. Everybody would say where they really go to get work done and no one would say work. So this is this weird irony that I'm worried about as we go right back into that perception that the people who show up early and stay late are the hard workers when in reality they're playing a perception game. It's the people who know I'm going to get this thing done so I can't be interrupted. I need to go somewhere else. Those are the people that actually get things done. So what do you think, what's the data say about what's going to happen going forward from here? I mean, the pandemic showed us that you don't have to be at work to do work. And you're saying that in fact, some of the more engaged workers are not in the office. They're somewhere else getting their work done.

Starting point is 00:50:55 So how is this going to play out now that things are getting back to normal? Is this going to be a permanent change in the workplace? Or are things going to go back to the way they were? Or what do you think is going to be a permanent change in the workplace or are things going to go back to the way they were? Or what do you think is going to happen? I think what's going to happen is that people are going to want a workplace that is more flexible. They're going to want a place where they can come and feel welcome, but also they don't want to feel obligated. They want to know that since I have to wait for the repair guy on Wednesday afternoon, I don't feel like I'm spending my PTO working from

Starting point is 00:51:25 home one afternoon. Or because I know that all of our meetings happen on Monday and on Thursday, I don't feel like I'm not working by choosing to take Tuesday and have it be solo focus time. We want to create a workplace where everyone feels welcomed, but no one feels obligated. And that 25% to 30% of time out of the office, I think that's where we settle. I don't think most people become full-time remote workers, but I think they go back to the office wanting more flexibility than they had in 2019. Well, in the past, it seems that at least for many jobs and many people, work was a place you went. Now it seems more like it's a thing you do and the place that you do it doesn't necessarily matter as much. So to me, the question is not, and there's all these articles

Starting point is 00:52:16 we're seeing right now as we're recording this about how remote work is the new signing bonus and that sort of thing. It's not actually about where you work. It's about whether or not you work for an organization that trusts you and gives you the autonomy over deciding the environment you work in. If you have that, I actually don't care what kind of office you work in or don't work in, et cetera. Well, it makes me think that, you know, one day we'll be telling our grandkids, you know, when I was younger, we used to have to work and go into the office every single day and we couldn't leave until five o'clock, and it will seem somewhat archaic. David Berkus has been my guest. He's an organizational psychologist, and the name of his book is Leading From Anywhere, and he also has a really interesting

Starting point is 00:52:59 TED Talk on why you should know what your co-workers Make. And there's links to the book and to the TED Talk in the show notes. Thanks, David. Al, thank you. Thanks again so much for having me. We all know cute things when we see them, and we react differently when we see cute things. But why? Well, the answer may be found in evolutionary biology. If we think about evolution, our goal as a species is to survive and pass on our genes. The way we pass on our genes is by

Starting point is 00:53:34 having babies, but babies need us to take care of them and keep them alive. By finding things cute, we're more likely to want to take care of them and protect them. This is according to Dr. Sandra Pimentel of the Montefiore Medical Center in New York. Our brains make us enjoy looking at cute things by rewarding us with dopamine. That's a chemical that makes us feel happy. The physical traits of babies are also features that we find cute when they show up on other things, like baby animals, cartoon characters, and even cars. Those traits are a large forehead, large eyes, round cheeks, small chin, and small nose.

Starting point is 00:54:20 And that is something you should know. And that's this episode of the podcast. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. to point their fingers at a drug-addicted teenager, but local deputy Ruth Vogel isn't convinced. She suspects connections to a powerful religious group. Enter federal agent V.B. Loro, who has been investigating a local church for possible criminal activity. The pair form an unlikely partnership to catch the killer,

Starting point is 00:54:58 unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law, her religious convictions, and her very own family. But something more sinister than murder is afoot, and someone is watching Ruth. Chinook. Starring Kelly Marie Tran and Sanaa Lathan. Listen to Chinook wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Jennifer, a founder of the Go Kid Go Network.

Starting point is 00:55:25 At Go Kid Go, putting kids first is at the heart of every show that we produce. That's why we're so excited to introduce a brand new show to our network called The Search for the Silver Lining, a fantasy adventure series about a spirited young girl named Isla who time travels to the mythical land of Camelot. Look for The Search for the Silver Lining on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Something You Should Know - Mysteries of the Human Body & Why You Should Know What Your Coworkers Earn

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