Something You Should Know - SYSK Choice: The Power of Word-of-Mouth Marketing & Why Dogs Love Us

Episode Date: November 27, 2021

Want to know if someone you like is truly compatible with you? Check out their taste in music. This episode begins with an interesting look at how your taste in music can have a big impact on who you are attracted to and who may be attracted to you. Turns out you can tell a lot about someone by the tunes they listen to. http://www.medindia.net/news/Music-Predicts-Sexual-Attraction-80223-1.htm I often urge you to tell other people about this podcast because word-of-mouth marketing is considered to be one of the most effective and powerful methods to spread the word about an idea, or product or - yes a podcast. So who starts word of mouth marketing about something and what causes it to spread? Ted Wright, CEO of a marketing firm called Fizz and author of the book Fizz (https://amzn.to/2lLeUiA) is an expert on this subject. Listen as he joins me to explain how word-of-mouth marketing works and how you can make it work for your ideas or business. How clean is the air in your home? Probably not as clean as you think and probably not as clean as it could be. Listen to hear how you can easily make your indoor air a lot healthier. (Source: Jeff May, author of “My House Is Killing Me!” (https://amzn.to/2nhDZ5c) For centuries, dogs and people have gotten along pretty well. Why is that? Canine researcher Dr. Clive Wynne, founding director of the Canine Science Callaboratory at Arizona State University and author of the book Dog Is Love: Why and How Your Dog Loves You (https://amzn.to/2l4STLc) joins me to explain our amazing bond we have with dogs how to make it even stronger. PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! Grab NordVPN’s Cyber Month Deal! Go to https://nordvpn.com/SOMETHING or use code SOMETHING to get up to 73% off your NordVPN Plan + a bonus gift! T-Mobile for Business the leader in 5G, #1 in customer satisfaction, and 5G in every plan! https://T-Mobile.com/business Discover offers "Live Customer Service" with US based representatives available 24/7! Learn more at https://discover.com Grow your business with Shopify today at https://Shopify.com/sysk  Visit https://ferguson.com for the best in all of your plumping supply needs! https://www.geico.com Bundle your policies and save! It's Geico easy! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Today on Something You Should Know, how liking certain types of music makes you more or less attractive to others. Then, ideas catch on because of word-of-mouth marketing. And it all starts with the same 10% of the population called influencers. Are you one of them? In the 10% of the U.S. population that is an influencer, they have three particular personality traits. They like to try new things because they're new.

They like to share stories with their friends. And they're intrinsically motivated. Also today, how to make sure the air in your home is really clean and it probably isn't. Plus, a look at why dogs and humans bond so well. The secret of dog success around people is that dogs really love people. That's why they're so special to us and why we take care of them because Because they tell us how much they care about us. All this today on Something You Should Know. Bumble knows it's hard to start conversations.

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Then sit back and let your matches start the chat. Download Bumble and try it for yourself. Something you should know. Fascinating intel. The world's top experts. And practical advice you can use in your life. Today, Something You Should Know with Mike Carruthers. Hello. Welcome to Something You Should Know. As usual, we have a lot to cover today. So let's jump in and talk about relationships and music. According to a study in Psychology of Music, men and women with similar taste in music tend to have better sex lives,

tend to communicate better, and have much longer lasting relationships. That's because most of us develop specific musical preferences while we're growing up. Our taste in music can reflect our childhood, our emotional connections, and even our values. One study even broke down compatibility by music genre. The findings suggest that devotion to country music makes both men and women less attractive to someone of the opposite sex who does not like country music. Men who loved heavy metal music were found more attractive, while women who loved metal music were not. Guys liked women who liked classical music,

but women shied away from guys who liked classical music. Both men and women who liked jazz and blues tended to be more open to new experiences. And that is something you should know. Frequently, I end episodes of this podcast by asking you to share it with someone you know. It's my way of getting a little word-of-mouth marketing going. And it's actually been quite successful. Our audience continues to grow month after month, and we do very little outside paid advertising. I don't think we've done any of it. It's mostly just people telling other people who tell other people. It's a pretty strongly held belief that word-of-mouth marketing is the best kind of advertising there is.

That if you can get people to tell their friends about a product or service or idea, and they tell their friends, and they tell their friends, that's about as good as it gets. So how do you make word-of-mouth advertising or word-of-mouth marketing work exactly? Here to discuss that is Ted Wright. Ted is the CEO of a company called Fizz, which specializes in word-of-mouth marketing, and he's author of a book called Fizz. Hey Ted, so why don't you start with the story of how you got interested in word-of-mouth marketing? It's a really interesting story, so let's start there. So it all came about, I had my eureka moment when I was at the University of Chicago

for business school. I was in the computer lab one day early in the morning and noticed that the ambient light in the computer lab was blue, which is basically the light that was thrown off of the Netscape screen. And so everyone was using Netscape, and Netscape was only kind of an okay thing. And I was using Netscape, and, of course, I was cussing at the inanimate object because it really wasn't giving me a decent search return that I needed. And somebody leaned over and said, hey, why don't you use Google? And I thought, well, I know what a Google is mathematically, but I didn't know what that was

as a company. And so I asked and they told me to go to the site and I went to the site and voila, beautiful, fast, efficient, right. You know, I did some A-B testing and then I was gone. And about 20 minutes later, the person next to me is going through the same thing and, you know, five or six hours. So I lean over and I share the answer with them. And then five or six hours later, I get up, I'm done writing my paper and I stand up and the ambient light in the room has turned from blue to white because person to person that had just gone just like an old game of telephone and everybody had converted to Google. And I was like, that's really interesting. No advertising, no commercials, no anything. They just changed 30 people through just conversation and no money changing hands,

no paid endorsements, anything like that. I also watched TiVo get adopted in the same way. This is the very late 90s. So this is like 98, 99 and 2000. So I had my eureka moment, which was, I think word of mouth is going to come back and start to play a bigger and bigger role. So I built the algorithms and I built all the mechanics to do a replicable word of mouth marketing campaign that gets results. And our first client was Pabst Blue Ribbon. We've gone on from there. Well, that's a great story. But I think people believe that when they came out, TiVo and Google, these were very new, very unique kind of products

that lend themselves to word-of-mouth marketing. But if you're just selling widgets or copiers or dry cleaning, that it's very hard to generate that kind of excitement on a more mundane product or service. So you used two words. You used new and you used unique. And then there's another word in there we could drop in, so differentiated. New and unique doesn't really make a difference.

It's differentiated. Because TiVo is, in fact, not new. TiVo is just a digital VCR. And Google is not new. It's just all of the world's knowledge. And they wrote an algorithm to be able to do that. And then they put the labor onto you and I saying yes and no by how many clicks we did. And it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. So the question is, for everybody out there, is my product or service talkable? Is it worth one consumer saying to another consumer, hey, I know this thing about you, and I know this product or service could solve a problem that I'm pretty sure you have, or that I actually know that you have, and let me take a minute and tell you about this. Isn't it, though, human nature that it's got to be pretty outstanding for

somebody to go to that trouble? So in the 10% of the U.S. population that is an influencer, they have three particular dominant personality traits. They like to try new things because they're new. They like to share stories with their friends, and they're intrinsically motivated. So if you're that influencer personality, and by the way, Ed Keller's done some great work that says it is that 10% that drives the other 90% into buying everything. Influencers are not looking for life-changing miracle things to share with their friends. In fact, there are things that are life-changing and miracle-creating. They're looked at slightly askance because we've all been burned for other reasons by things that actually didn't live up to that. What they do like to find is they do like to find things that are better, are better than what somebody is currently using. So instead of drinking this beer, why don't

you drink this beer? Because it has a lot more flavor and it's a lot tastier. Or instead of driving this minivan, have you thought about that minivan? Now, the difference between a Chrysler Town & Country and a Honda Odyssey is probably not much. I mean, four wheels, electric windows, all the rest of that. But one of those has a much more superior design, so you spill less Cheerios in the floor. And if your mom picking up kids and Cheerios in the floor is not your favorite thing in the world, even though that's not going to change the course of somebody's life, it's a little bit better. That's what influencers talk about. Anything that will change somebody's life for better, either a little bit better or a lot better, it's all equal because an influencer, she seeks to share stories with her friends as a way of expressing like or expressing love for somebody.

Like, I want you to have a better day. I think this will help you do that. Therefore, I'm going to tell you about it. And do those 10% know who they are? Do people self-identify as influencers? When you talk to people about influencers and everyone says, oh, yeah, you mean my friend blank, and they just add the name in there. I think very few people, you know, wish to wear the under ruse of an I am an influencer and you have a big sort of cape and tights and the big eye on your chest. I think what goes on is that people in their earliest years just run into these things give

me joy, sharing stories about stuff or things or services that I like and sharing that with people and having them have a better life or think, oh, wow, that's cool, or come back and tell me, wow, that's cool. This is something that's important for me, and so I do it, and so I continue to do it. I mean, we believe that somebody's personality is pretty much set by the time they're 10 years old. There's some psychoanalysts that believe in some schools of thought that think it's much earlier. But generally, if you're a North American by age 10, 12, 8, somewhere around there, those parts of being an influencer are pretty much set in your personality. And it just depends on how dominant they are,

and that depends on how much joy you get out of doing those specific things, which is sharing stories with your friends. It seems that one thing that really makes something worth talking about, worth telling your friends about, is if it somehow manages to become cool. If generally people think, this is pretty cool, it's a lot easier to talk about it because then it makes you look cool. So how does something become cool? As opposed to cool, which is an excellent word, but let's say what makes a story shareable? What makes a story talkable? Which could also easily be cool.

A story is interesting to the influencer, so they'll pick it up and they'll seek more information about it. It's relevant to the influencer's audience and is authentic to the way the influencer currently views either the brand in specific or the category in general. So a story is cool or a story is readily shared among friends that know each other if it is interesting, if it is relevant, and if it is authentic. So can you give me an example or two maybe to kind of flesh this out? Let's just look at some of the work that we've done. We did some work with a company called Bissell, and they make the world's greatest carpet sweeper.

But that design is a century old at this point with some tweaks, so why is this really new? So it turns out that this Bissell sweeper is fabulous for picking up little annoying things that kids under five generally drop on the ground, like the little tiniest Lego pieces that have all the sharp corners, and those are the ones that parents always step on in the middle of the night. And so it turns out that it's very good at picking those up. And it's as good as a vacuum cleaner, but your vacuum cleaner, you know, it sucks it all the way through the machine, and it ends up in the bag, and you've got to go through all the cat hair to get the little piece out, because, you know, your 5-year-old or your 6-year-old obviously cannot be playing, you know, Mace Windu with a red lightsaber blade because it's a purple lightsaber blade.

So as a parent, you're like, okay, well, let's just try and figure this out. So the abyssal sweeper ends up being the world's greatest thing to pick up Legos with. So you go and you demo this. And if you're a Lego parent, of which there are hundreds of thousands across the United States, you're like, oh, this is the greatest thing ever. Now the kids, I'm not stepping on these things. The kids love using the sweeper, and they pick them up, and my house is cleaner, and it's less of a mess, and it's fabulous. Now if you're not a Lego parent, you totally don't care

because you don't have Legos in your house, and you're not stepping on them in the middle of the night. But if you're a Lego parent, and your kid's got 10, 15, 20,000 of these little bricks, any one of them can come and bite you on the bottom of the foot at any one moment. This is, you know, a gift from the heavens. So one Lego parent tells another Lego parent, and they tell two friends, and all of a sudden, you know, the velocity of sweepers are up 50% in two years. That's a great example, because as soon as you said Bissell,

I thought of my grandmother. And also people who have worked in restaurants when they were little, like when they were 16, 17, 18, like that thing, we had more comments, yes, people's grandparents, or, oh yeah, I used that in when I was working in the Red Lobster in Fredonia, Florida. And they would say, oh, I never thought about that. And then what happens is then they go and that influencer person goes and they tell all their friends. And sometimes we're at physical locations where there are lots of Lego bricks and there's lots of kids and there's lots of carpet. And you'd see people go over, have a little conversation and would either by the hand or just psychically haul people over and say, no, look, look. And we'd have a line of kids, and they'd be, you know, can I do it next? Can I do it next? And nobody had ever seen their five-year-old willingly want to clean up stuff,

and it picks them all up off the carpet, and there's no hassle, and there's nothing getting lost, and no more tears, And it's fabulous for everybody. Now, did it grow hair on top of people's heads with male paddle baldness? No. Did it cure cancer? No. Are we changing the course of humanity? No.

But is it awesome that when your plane is delayed and you get home at like 3 in the morning, and is it awesome that you're not impaling yourself on one of these Lego bricks? It is. And for $30, what the heck? So also to remember, just as a bit here, the average word-of-mouth conversation in the United States is only 32 seconds long. So we're not talking about big, long diatribes with white papers and we're talking about just one friend telling another friend

while the kids are in swim practice, or people are talking in the narthex after church, or just, you know, sitting around whatever virtual or physical water cooler it is, just, hey, I know this about you. I know this about this product or service. I think you should know about it, because I think it could be important to you. Boom. Great. I'm talking with Ted Wright about word of mouth marketing. Ted is the CEO of a company called Fizz, which specializes in word of mouth, and his book is also called Fizz.

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Visit betterhelp.com to learn more. That's betterhelp.com. So Ted, I wanted to ask you because you brought up a great example of Bissell being the number one carpet sweeper, but I suspect that's in a category where there aren't a lot of other carpet sweepers vying for the number one spot. What do you do when you're in a more crowded field? Say you have a break shop, or you're a web designer, or you work from home and have a babysitting service. How do you differentiate yourself from all the other ones? So you create differentiation by finding something that is unique at your core that you can do better than lots of other people. So let's think about a marketplace where you have lots of different things going on. We've worked with a couple of country acts, and there are new country acts this week, and there are new country acts next week,

and there's going to be a whole bunch of new stuff next year. And there's a whole catalog of all this other stuff, you know, going back half a century. So crowded market space, lots of noise, lots of vying for the entertainment dollar. So as a band, what you have to do is you have to say, okay, what are we going to really be about? And as we are about those things, who do we think are most likely to care about those things that we are going to be about?

And so when you say, okay, who really cares, then you start to identify targets. And instead of just people who like country music you can get more narrow and when you can get more narrow you can get more specific and as you get more specific as a brand either a product or service you have more and more people recognize in the offering that you're doing like oh i would really like that that is super cool for me i should go get that and then they go and they sample it. And if their experience matches the story that their friends told them, then they just stay and they continue to sample at whatever rate they're going to sample.

How do you find influencers to get your message to them? So influencers, you don't find them, they find you. So let's go back to the personality traits for influencers. They like to try new things because they're new. They like to share stories with their friends and they're intrinsically motivated. Because they like to share stories with their friends, they're always swimming through the sea of commercial information that's out there. Your job is not to try and corral the fish in the ocean because that's a lot of work. Your job is to get the right bait, the right story. And you have to do that by thinking about, okay, what's my target and where are they going to be? And then you take that bait and you throw it into the, you know, the ocean

of humanity that you've got swimming around. And those people, if you do that right, those people that are influencers are going to, you know, come up there as fish in our fish analogy. They're going to come and they're going to chomp down on your bait. And then you got them. The other way is to put on swim fins and goggles and like swim through the ocean and chase fish. And that you can do, but it's way more expensive and way less efficient than creating an opportunity for the fish to come to you and to attract them to you. So it's like in Jaws, when they're looking for the shark, they just throw some meat in the water and wait. That's exactly right. So let's talk about Jaws for a second. All right. So let's start. If we're going to hunt great white sharks, we take big pieces of bloody chum and we go deep into the ocean and we throw them in there

and we hope there's a blood trail and then great white sharks will come and then we try and catch one. If we were going to try and attract angelfish inshore in a reef, taking that same chum of a story and dropping it in there would just scare the hell out of the angelfish, and they'd run away. But if you go to the little grocery store and you get frozen peas, and peas are high in sugar and they're green, so fish can see them very well, and you throw frozen peas into a reef, every fish will come out and there'll be fish fights

and there'll be like hundreds of thousands of fish show up. Again, if we're hunting great white sharks, if we throw some green peas into the ocean, ain't going to be the sharks. So it is knowing who your audience is, which fish am I going after, and which chum is going to be best for that particular fish. And then your job as a marketer is not to chase the fish. Your job is to keep putting bait in the water because the fish will come to you, just like consumers will come to you. Consumers in the United States are super smart. We are the most marketed to people on the entire planet Earth.

On average, a U.S. consumer gets hit with about 14,000 commercial messages a day. So we ain't stupid. We're very well trained in marketing. So we can make our own rational decisions. You have to put, as a marketer, you have to put a story that's going to attract people, and they'll make the right decision for themselves. So how does social media fit into the word-of-mouth marketing equation? If you share something on Facebook or Twitter, is that word-of-mouth?

What social media cannot do is it can't really convert very well into actual sales. So the trust factor on a face-to-face conversation is two orders of magnitude greater than a digital conversation, even if both sides of the digital conversation already know each other. This, we believe, I mean, there's some research on this, but this is coming out now. We believe this is because we know of 156 different, separate, distinct ways that somebody communicates with somebody else face-to-face. From hand gesticulation to voice modulation to vocabulary choice to facial, like the whole thing. And we also know there's at least 11,000 years of cultural history about talking to one another,

and there's all kinds of rituals like the handshake or in Asia, the bow, and there's all kinds of things going on. In digital, that doesn't exist. There's only six known ways that we can figure out to communicate with somebody digitally. So there's so many fewer nuances that the digital conversations are just not nearly as effective. That's fascinating. You know, I don't think people realize how sophisticated word-of-mouth marketing can be. I think the perception is mostly that, you know, it's just one person tells another person, and it's great if that happens, and that's a great way to market your product. But clearly, there's a lot more to it, and you've explained it really well.

Ted Wright is CEO of a company called Fizz, and he is author of the book Fizz, which is all about word-of-mouth marketing. You'll find a link to his book in the show notes. Thanks, Ted. Thanks. At Wealthsimple, we're built for whatever you're building. Built for Jane, who wants to break into the housing market. We're built for Ted, who wants to break into the housing market. We're built for Ted, who's obsessed with what's happening in the global markets. And built for Celine, who just wants to retire and explore the world's flea markets. So take a moment and think about what you're building for. We've got the financial tools to help make it happen. Wealthsimple. Built for possibilities. Visit wealthsimple.com

slash possibilities. 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. 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. I've always been a dog lover. Not that I don't like cats. I had some great cats when I was younger. But mostly, I'm more of a dog person. And like most dog people, I've always wondered about why it is that dogs bond so well with humans, and why we bond so well with them. What does my dog get out of our relationship?

What is she thinking or not thinking about me? What could make the relationship better? Well, one person who has been hard at work studying all this for the past 15 years is Clive Wynn. He is founding director of the Canine Science Collaboratory at Arizona State University, and he is author of a book called Dog is Love, Why and How Your Dog Loves You. Hi, Clive. Mike, thank you for inviting me. So part of the appeal of having a dog is that

that devotion that a dog has. Every dog owner knows that feeling of coming home to a dog who is just so happy to see you. It's a very special feeling that dog owners know. Well right and even if you're not a dog lover, even people who are not dog lovers recognize that dogs love us, right? Even if you don't feel inclined to reciprocate it. So when I started studying dogs, the dominant theory that existed among scientists who were interested in dogs was that dogs had evolved special kinds of intelligence, special kinds of cognition, that they were especially skilled in understanding what we were up to. And I started looking into that,

and I found I just couldn't believe that. Not that I don't believe the dogs understand what we're up to. I just don't think that that's a particularly unique skill about dogs. And it wasn't until I got a dog of my own again, after many years without canine company, that it came through to me. This dog we got, Zephyr she's not smart she's honestly not smart but she is so loving and that's really when the penny dropped for me and I recognized that the secret of dog success around people is that dogs really love people that's why they're so special to us and why we take care of them because they tell us how much they care about us. Do you have a sense that dogs would rather be with other dogs or they'd rather be with people

or they would just rather be with something? So it's all a question of how your dog grows up, how a dog grows up, because no being is born knowing what kinds of other beings it's okay to form strong bonds with. Our dogs were born around people, all of them. They were all born around people, and so they love people and they want to have strong relationships with people. Many dogs also grow up with other dogs in the home, and so they can form strong bonds with their own kind. Dogs can form strong bonds with, as far as we know, with any other living thing. I've seen that here in Arizona where I went and visited some goat ranchers

who have dogs that were put with goats when they were puppies, and those dogs now form strong bonds with the goats, and so they'll follow the goats around wherever they go, and they'll protect them mainly from coyotes around here the most colorful example i know of which i haven't yet seen for myself but i'd dearly love to is in australia where they've raised dogs with penguins puppies with penguins and now they have adult dogs who care about penguins and that's fantastic because there's a particular island off the south coast of Australia where sometimes, certain times of year at low tide,

foxes can get out onto this island and have repeatedly decimated the penguin population. And now that the dogs live out there and care about the penguins, they keep the foxes away. So yeah, our dogs have an amazingly open capacity to form strong bonds with members of different species, so long as, this is the crux, they're exposed to that other species early in life. Do you think it's the case that there is something about dogs that when a dog bonds with a human or a goat or a penguin, that there's something about the dog that makes

the other species want to be friends with them, that they want to reciprocate and bond back. Well, I wouldn't want to go too far with that, Mike. I'm not sure. I haven't seen it for myself. I'm not sure how strongly the penguins care about the dogs. From the movies and pictures I've seen, it seems on the penguin side to be more or less tolerance. But certainly in our own species, and this I think is the crux of the matter, because dogs can fall in love with penguins and they can fall in love with goats. But that's not the secret of their success success the secret of their success is that they hitch their wagons to ours and so by falling in love with us yes we feel compelled to reciprocate this and we're and it and it helps us right I mean dogs help us there

is a study where they put heart rate monitors on both people and their dogs. And so they can show how when the people and the dogs sit together on a sofa, their hearts calm down and fall into synchrony. Our dogs, numerous studies show this now, have a positive therapeutic benefit for human beings. And this is a sign from all the amazing jobs that dogs do for us, starting way back in prehistory when dogs started helping people hunt, which I think is probably where our affection for them first started when we saw how much they could help us. So what is my dog thinking? I don't think, I don't think the dogs think an awful lot, but they feel an awful lot. So I personally don't believe the dogs have high levels of cognition, of thinking.

But I do think that they feel their emotional states are very, very strong in them. And it's not like you don't need to be some kind of scientist to be able to read this. I mean, when you come home, you can see how happy your dog is to have you back. Right now, my dog is in a sort of relaxed, happy state that she knows I'm nearby. She probably likes hearing my voice rattling on here. that calms her that everything is right in her world everything is in its right place now on the other hand if something happens that frightens her then i definitely can see that i mean one of the wonderful things about the human dog partnership is how well we read each other that we can see in our dog's tails, you know, and we don't have tails, right? We don't have tails and we

don't take, say, our arms and wag them the way a dog would wag its tail. And yet we, generally speaking, are very successful in reading our dog's emotional expressions, which is a magical thing, really, when you stop and think about it. So I know a lot of people, myself included, worry that sometimes, you know, when the dog is just, you know, sitting around the house all day, waiting to go to bed and sit around the bed all night and that there isn't much going on in their life on some days. And, you know, I feel bad about that. And should I? Well, it depends. I mean, different strokes for different folks.

I mean, different dogs have radically different personalities some dogs need to be out and about chasing and running after things all the time but my dog for example clearly doesn't need that much stimulation but I think what all dogs need is companionship companionship they need to have people that they care about near them most of the time. And I think the cruelest thing that we routinely do to our dogs is that we take this highly social animal who we love having around precisely because they are such social beings, and then we shut them away all alone in a house or apartment while we go out for work for 8, 10, 12 hours a day and I think that can be positively cruel to a highly, highly

social animal. You don't need to, you know, you don't need the special treats. You don't need the clothing or the special toys, generally speaking. You just need to be there. You need to be there for your dog. Well, people have to work. Absolutely. Absolutely. So people should think carefully and seriously before they acquire a dog. They should ask themselves whether their life really has, as I like to put it, a dog-shaped space in it. And remember, our dogs don't just love us. My dog doesn't just love me and yours doesn't just love you, Mike. But they are very capable of forming good relationships with many people and indeed with members of other species, as we already talked about.

So if you have more than one dog, they can keep each other company while you're away. Or if that's not a realistic option for you, you can engage the help of a dog walker or a dog sitter or just a friend who has a more flexible schedule than you do, who can pop around and say hi to your dog or a good doggy daycare. All of these can be fine substitutes. It's not essential that your dog spends every moment of the day with you, but your dog should be able to spend most of its days with somebody. You mentioned a few minutes ago that you didn't think that dogs think too much, but you can train a dog to do a lot of things. And often a dog will react when they do something bad that they've done before. Like they seem to like, remember, this wasn't such a great idea that there is some thinking going on, isn't there? It becomes a bit of a technical argument about what we want to mean

by thinking. See, I think that thinking involves being able to do things like have second thoughts and so on. Our dogs certainly are. Dogs are very trainable, very biddable, and they can be very quick at learning these things. And certain dogs can learn to do the most amazingly complex things. I personally don't think of that as thinking. I don't think of trainability is the same thing as thinking but it's i'm getting into a little bit of a unnecessarily technical splitting hairs thing there i mean yeah absolutely some dogs learn to do the most amazing tasks i mean um i i still think that sniffer dogs are the most amazing beings that we we put our lives in their paws you know, quite literally, they're saving lives every day. It's an amazing thing. There are some some boundaries, I think,

though, in in the dog human relationship for and what I mean by that is, for example, I've heard that dogs don't really like to be hugged, that that's a more of a threat to them, they'll tolerate it from someone they love. But hugging your dog is probably not the best thing, yet hugging people is, you know, considered wonderful. Well, you know, that's not a scientific study. The report that suggested dogs do not like being hugged was not an actual scientific study. It was a blog post. Now, I agree, some dogs, some of the time, do not like being hugged. There are people who don't like being hugged, you know. It's not an inevitability.

You can't just go up and hug everybody you meet. So I think that with our dogs, just as with other people, we should allow ourselves to get to know them and pay attention to their body language and what they're telling us. I think of that with my own dog likes being hugged or at least doesn't mind being hugged. What she hates is being lifted off the ground. I've had dogs in the past who love being lifted up off the ground. And I remember when we took Zephos home and I lifted her up off the ground because I just thought she was so cute and I wanted to.

And she rapidly conveyed to me that she was not comfortable with this at all. And so, yeah, we have to, with our dogs, just as with our human friends, we have to pay attention to what they're telling us. And that's how to make sure that we all enjoy our lives together. If your dog appears to enjoy being hugged and doesn't tuck her tail in an upset kind of a way or try and wriggle away from you, then I can't see why anybody should tell you not to do that. And on the other hand, when you acquire a new dog and you're tempted to give her a hug, pay attention to her. She's got body language and she's very, very expressive. And she can tell you whether she's happy with this or not. And if she's not, then respect her, her space, her personal space and don't do that. Where do you come down on the dog sleeps in the bed or doesn't sleep in the bed?

It's the same story. If you're happy and your dog's happy, you know, am I going to tell you not to do it? Why would I tell you not to do it? On the other hand, if it doesn't suit you, you're entitled to say to your dog, no, I don't want you sleeping up here. Thank you very much. And your dog will, just as you can learn to respect what your dog needs, so too your dog can learn to respect your needs. It wouldn't be cruel to tell your dog you cannot sleep on the bed. There's no cruelty in denying your dog your bed.

And on the other hand, you want to do it, I do it, we do it, and we're all very happy with it. And I'm not going to let anybody tell me I can't do it. So it's a question of mutual respect. In all the research that you've done over the last 15 years about dogs, what are some of the more surprising things that people might not know? So one thing that surprised me is how quickly dogs form new relationships. And this wasn't an experiment we did. This was actually done in Hungary by a researcher who took dogs at a shelter and just played with them for 10 minutes a day for just one week. And she found that the dogs formed strong relationships with the people that they played with, even given such a very limited amount of interaction. We've done our own

experiments showing that dogs living in a shelter within minutes start to show an interest in people. So that's one thing that I hadn't expected, how quickly, and that's important to realize how quickly dogs form new relationships. And that's important to realize how quickly dogs form new relationships and that's important to realize because if you're thinking of getting a new dog you might be nervous about taking on an adult animal you might think that taking on an adult dog would be like adopting a teenage child that this individual would already have strong relationships in their past that would make it difficult for them to form new strong bonds. And the great thing about dogs is that's just not true. Dogs very quickly form strong new bonds with

people. And so that's a, to me, surprising thing and a wonderful thing because it means we can help shelter dogs that much more easily. But there are so many things I talk about in the book Dog Is Love that really surprised me when I first learned about them. The brain scans that show how the reward centers in a dog's brain light up when they're shown a signal that means that their owner is nearby. And for many of the dogs that were tested, the majority, they actually lit up more strongly when they were told that their owner was nearby than when they were told that there was some food on its way. So the dog's brains actually indicated a more strong rewarding effect of the human's company than of food. And we've done experiments ourselves, very simple experiments, where we take a dog,

a dog who's been left home alone all day, and in the garage that connects to the main house, we set up a very simple choice for the dog. We place the owner at one spot, and we place a bowl of food at the other spot. And then we have an assistant open the door from the house to the garage, and the dog looks out the door and is confronted by this choice, a dog who's been alone for eight hours and has had no food for eight hours. And now here's the choice. What does the dog go for? The dog goes for the human.

The dog chooses the human, not the food. So, of course, our dogs love food, but they actually love us even more. And that surprised me. I think that does surprise a lot of people, where it does seem that the dog is just always hungry. And anytime food is around, screw you. Well, the thing is, usually, Mike, in those kinds of situations, the owner is present already. So it's not a choice between either I get to interact with my owner or I get to have some food.

Because usually, if you, the owner, are giving the dog food, you're there already. So you need to create a slightly artificial situation to create a circumstance where the dog has to choose either my food or my owner. And it's when they get forced to choose that we see how much they really care about their human beings. Anything else that really kind of would surprise people about dogs and either what they, how they behave or what they, how they do anything? One of the most exciting pieces of research is that we've been able to identify in the genetic code of dogs, three genes that mutated on the journey from wolf to dog. And these genes are responsible for dogs super friendly manner.

And in human beings, there are very rare cases where these genes are also mutated. And this is a very rare syndrome called Williams syndrome. And people with Williams syndrome, well, you know, they act rather like dogs. They're super, super friendly. When we made this discovery, I was worried that the parents of Williams syndrome children might be offended because it sort of likens these kids to dogs. You know, even if you love dogs, you don't really want people telling you your child is like a dog. So I was a little uncertain how parents of people with Williams syndrome

would respond to this. But our scientific report got picked up by some of the news media, and one of the journalists interviewed the president of the Williams Syndrome Parent Association of the United States. And this guy said to the reporter, he said, I always knew if our kids had tails, they'd be wagging them. In other words, it struck him exactly as making very good sense that this Williams Syndrome mutation very much produces a similar pattern of behavior, similar pattern of friendliness, super friendliness in people that we see in our dogs.

So to me, that was one of the most exciting pieces of science that I've ever been involved in. Well, I really appreciate the fact that someone like you is studying dogs and their relationships to humans because for many humans, that relationship is very important, very strong, and it's always good to learn more about it and what makes it tick and how to make it better. My guest has been Clive Wynn. He is the founding director of the Canine Science Collaboratory at Arizona State University and his book is called Dog is Love, Why and How Your Dog Loves You. You'll find a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Thanks, Clive.

Mike, thanks. That was really great fun. I really enjoyed talking with you. If you have central air conditioning or forced air heating, chances are you're not filtering out all the junk in the air that you should. According to Jeff May, who is author of the book My House is Killing Me and an indoor air specialist, he says less than 10% of us have the right kind of filter. And shelling out big bucks for an expensive filter doesn't guarantee the best results. The cheapest and easiest way to improve the air quality in your home is to get a really good disposable filter. The fiberglass panel filters aren't enough.

The best kind is a pleated filter rated MERV 8 or higher, which you can get at pretty much any hardware store or home improvement store. Don't pay extra for filters that are washable and reusable, says Jeff. Stick with the disposable ones. Experts say there's really no way to get the washable, reusable filters clean enough. Replacing filters every three months will give you cleaner air and save you money. Dirty filters force your system to work harder. And that is something you should know. That's the podcast today.

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