Something You Should Know - What it Really Takes To Be a Winner & What to Do About the New Culture of Rudeness

Episode Date: February 15, 2018

Want to be more persuasive? There is a simple phrase or two you can add to any request that will increase the chances that almost anyone will do you the favor you ask. I’ll tell you what those phrases are. If you’ve been watching the Olympics, you’ve seen THE best athletes in the world competing against each other. So how do you get to be the best? And what separates the very best from the “pretty good?” Ashley Merryman, co-author of the book Top Dog: The Science of Winning and Losing (http://amzn.to/2CiopYU) reveals some fascinating stories and research that anyone can use to improve your chances of winning in whatever you choose to do. There isn’t a soul alive who hasn’t gotten an email or 2 (or thousands!) offering male enhancement pills, creams and lotions. The problem is, none of them work. And there is even a bigger problem with these fake potions. Listen to discover what it is. Are people becoming ruder? Sure seems that way to me. So where did this need to be “brutally honest” come from? Danny Wallace, author of the book F You Very Much (http://amzn.to/2HeCzxV) looks at the origins of this new lack of civility as well as what it is doing and how we can stop it. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today on Something You Should Know, there's a simple phrase you can use that will get almost anyone to do almost anything for you. Then, understanding the science of winning and losing. A British researcher concluded that home-filled advantage gave you 160% more value in a negotiation. I was talking to a guy and I said, if you're asking your boss for a raise, you should ask for it in your office. No one gets to negotiate for raising their office. I said, I know exactly. Plus, mail enhancement. It's a multi-million dollar business and the entire thing is a total scam. And why does it seem people are getting ruder and nastier? There is just this sense that we all have to be heard. There's a phrase people use all the time, which is, I'm only being honest.

I'm just saying what other people are thinking. And I think you have to sort of ask yourself, why are other people only thinking it? Does it need to be said? All this today on Something You Should Know. As a listener to Something You Should Know, I can only assume that you are someone who likes to learn about new and interesting things and bring more knowledge to work for you in your everyday life. I mean, that's kind of what Something You Should Know was all about. And so I want to invite you to listen to another podcast called TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right?

Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks Daily. Now, you know about TED Talks, right? Many of the guests on Something You Should Know have done TED Talks. Well, you see, TED Talks Daily is a podcast that brings you a new TED Talk every weekday in less than 15 minutes. Join host Elise Hu. She goes beyond the headlines so you can hear about the big ideas shaping our future.

Learn about things like sustainable fashion, embracing your entrepreneurial spirit, the future of robotics, and so much more. Like I said, if you like this podcast, Something You Should Know, I'm pretty sure you're going to like TED Talks Daily. And you get TED Talks, wherever you get your podcasts. 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. So how do you share a podcast? That question came up recently from a listener who wanted to share an episode of this

podcast with someone else, and they were listening, I think, on iTunes or Apple Podcasts, as it's called now, and they weren't quite sure how to share it. But with all the directories, iTunes, Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, TuneIn, Google Play, There is a share button on or near the player, depending on which directory you're in, and you can just click on that and share away. And I encourage you to share this podcast with others because it will make you look so smart and so in the know. Our first topic today is how to get what you want.

The next time you really need someone to say yes, it's a good idea to use the old only if you want to trick. A study on persuasion techniques is suggesting that adding this simple phrase or one like it can double your chances of success. The best approach is to keep your request

short and sweet, be direct and sincere, and then follow the request with the phrase, but you're free to say no, or only if you want to. Reminding the other person that they are in control softens the favor and it makes it harder to say no. Now, the tone is also important. Even the slightest hint of insincerity or sarcasm can be perceived as passive-aggressive and it will backfire. And that is something you should know. One of the great things about watching the Olympics is knowing that you're watching the best of the best from all over the world. These are elite performers in their field. So how did they get there?

What did they do or what is it that they have that people who don't make the Olympic team have? And what do those who win a gold, silver, or bronze medal have that separates them from people who don't win a medal? Ashley Merriman has taken a careful look at what makes some people winners. She and her colleague, Poe Bronson, are authors of a book called Top Dog, The Science of Winning and Losing. And she joins me now to talk about what makes a winner

and how anyone can improve their chances of winning at anything. Hi, Ashley. Hi, Mike. Thanks for having me. So when you drill down into the science, if you can, what is it you think makes a winner? What are the characteristics of an elite performer? If you talk about elite performance, my favorite study, you know, because what's the difference between a novice and an elite performer? Lack of technical skill, right? That's not the surprise. The novice literally doesn't know what they're doing.

But what defines an elite performer, one from the next? Shouldn't they all be great? But they're not. One person wins a Super Bowl, one team wins a Super Bowl, one person walks home with an Olympic gold medal. They're all Olympians. They're all elite. They should all win. They should all perform at gold medal. They're all Olympians. They're all elite. They should all win.

They should all perform at ceiling. They're not. And a study at the Washington State University actually looked at this, and they had law enforcement officers come in, and they had at least 10 years of experience, and they were coming in for a shooting simulation task. Well, they all know how to do this. They've all had weapons training.

They've done this task before. They know how to operate a firearm. And the researchers determined that 73% of the variance, the difference between one performer and the next, for elite performance was psychophysiological factors. You know, how did they sleep the night before? Did they have an argument with their girlfriend in the car on the way to the lab? Were they scoring based on how many hits they got or how many hits they missed?

So it's not about the mechanical skills. It's about managing the psychology and using that to fuel your best performance. And, yes, I think the elite performers know that and they train for it. And it's very, and we've done, they've done studies. Why did you win the Olympics? What were you doing? And all of them have pretty consistent explanations in terms of how they became an Olympic champion.

And it's that kind of thing? It's getting enough sleep and not arguing with your girlfriend? Well, the Olympic champions specifically came up with a few key findings in terms of why they explained their victory. And for most of them, a lot of it had to do with the fact that they'd lost the last time. They hadn't even made the Olympic team or they lost in the finals. And they were so furious that they thought and agonized over every single element of their performance. And I don't mean that in a ruminating, oh, wow, I lost the Olympics. This was awful. Beat myself up for four years way.

It was scrutinizing every aspect of their performance so that they never made those mistakes again. So it's really fueled by this state of mind of, you know, you're in control. It's your responsibility to be your best, or at least the best you can be. You chose to try being Olympian. You chose to be the best guy on Wall Street, an amazing surgeon, an amazing attorney, the best at your work. It doesn't matter the context. You chose to do this.

It's your decision. You're in control. And that knowing that, you have this unshakable belief you will ultimately prevail, not just today, maybe today, but ultimately you will win. And if you have those, you can be an Olympic champion in any context. So failure, losing is a great motivator. Yes. The ultimate motivator, isn't it? Is it? Is it really? Oh, I have, well, that's a good question. I think it depends on the degree of the loss. If you're humiliated, you may want to give up and never do that again. But actually research has shown that someone who just missed it and really thinks, oh, I could have won, really can fuel them to a new level of success. But the key is that focus on what were the mistakes I made

and the things that were different that proved I can actually do this. If it was just missed it and I don't think no matter what I do, I can change the situation and the outcome will still be the same, I will always lose, then, yeah, you probably are going to drop out. We don't need guaranteed wins. We need a close race. We need the belief we can win, not the guarantee. Do you think that in order to win, you need help?

I mean, most Olympians have a coach. Most tennis stars have a coach. Do you need a coach, or can you do it yourself? I think you need a coach because you need someone to help you be a reference point to realize how much you need to develop. And that's actually more true for the expert. The expert needs to be reminded of how much farther they need to go because they're already so great that small differences on a day-to-day basis may not really seem like that much.

It may not be that motivating. But that next level is where you need an external source. So if it's not a coach, it could be a rival, right? But it's someone you need to look at as a comparison to remind you of where you still need to improve. Yeah, well, there's that quote in your book about how a horse never runs so fast as when he has other horses to catch up and outpace. And that rings right, that competition really does make you perform better.

If you know someone's running up on your tail there, you find that extra spurt to pull ahead. Oh, absolutely. And it challenges you, right? The other person makes you think, I can't take what I'm doing for granted. And in both ways, right? I think I'm doing really well, and then someone flies by me and like,

oh, wait, I wasn't as great as I was. Or it may be that you're struggling or pushing yourself to stay ahead. And that's what great competition is. You know, it's not about tearing your competitors down. It's not about embarrassing people. It's about using them to inspire you to do the best you can. And they have that same process. You know, if you want to find some motivation, pick someone who's just a little bit better than you. Not huge difference, but somewhat better than you, because then you have someone to chase.

Well, and most people listening are not, you know, going to be Olympians. They're going to, you know, but they're going to be wanting to win at other things, at work, at relationships, or whatever. Same rules apply, you think? Absolutely. In terms of the focus for improvement rather than focusing on results, how did you grow? I give that advice to elite performers, but I give that advice to five and six-year-olds

who are trying to learn how to write their name. It's not about being perfect. It's about, is it better than the last time you did it? So the rules and the mechanisms, the biology, the psychology, they all work the same. I'm speaking with Ashley Merriman. She and her colleague, Poe Bronson, are authors of the book, Top Dog, The Science of Winning and Losing. Whenever you visit a website and that homepage pops up,

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so they know you heard it here. 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, and overall behavior due to the hormonal changes it causes. Apple named The Jordan Harbinger Show one of the best podcasts a few years back, and in a nutshell, the show is aimed at making you a better, more informed, critical thinker.

Check out The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show. There's so much for you in this podcast. The Jordan Harbinger Show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. Contained herein are the heresies of Rudolf Buntwine, erstwhile monk turned traveling medical investigator. Join me as I study the secrets of the divine plagues and uncover the blasphemous truth that ours is not a loving God and we are not its favored children. The Heresies of Randolph Bantwine,

wherever podcasts are available. So, Ashley, what about things like home field advantage? I mean, what does the science say? What does the research say about those kind of things, like home field advantage? It's real and more relevant, I think, in some ways to business than it would be to sport. Although Major League Baseball stadiums, other ballparks, home field advantage is somewhere between a three to seven additional game, a win a year.

But if you build a shiny new stadium with new facilities, you actually can lose home field advantage for a year. And the reason is home field advantage is not just this is my turf. It's also this is not your turf. I own this, and you're going to have to take it from me. Those people in a new stadium don't feel at home at it because it's all shiny and new, and they may even have to protect themselves and protect the stadium from their own spills or mistakes. But once you own it,

someone else has to take it. So my favorite example of this is they actually did a study of Atlanta shopping malls and found that it's not your imagination. If you're waiting to get someone else's parking space, they take longer to leave the space. And they take even longer if you use your signal to say you're moving in and honk. And even though your goal is to leave the parking space, what you're doing is you're saying, here's something I now have, you want it, and I have to give it to you. And subconsciously, we don't want to do that. It's our turn. You've got to earn it. You've got to take it. That surprises me, because when I know somebody's waiting, I like to think that, oh, well, let me hurry up and get out so they can get the spot. But I sort of understand what you're saying, that, hey, wait a minute, I'm here already,

and you're not, and so just hold your horses. Back in the days when there were payphones, they did similar studies with payphones. And knowing someone was waiting for you to finish your call, you took longer. Yeah, that I can see. Yeah, but what's interesting, again, how quickly these things happen, a British researcher concluded that home field advantage gave you 160% more value in a negotiation, whether you were the buyer or the seller. And all it is is, you know, it's your office, and you get more value.

So knowing that research, I was talking to a guy, and I said, you know, if you're asking your boss for a raise, you should ask for it in your office. And he looked at me like I was talking to a guy and I said, you know, if you're asking your boss for a raise, you should ask for it in your office. And he looked at me like I was crazy. And he went, no one gets to negotiate for a raise in their office. I said, I know exactly. And he went, oh. It's because you're going to the boss and asking him for an increase on his turf and realizing it's up to him and not you if he says yes. What are some of the other science that you've looked at and uncovered

about winning in competition that people might not know, unrelated to home field advantage? What are some of the other things you've discovered? Well, when we're talking about the structure of competition, it was interesting having researched the book changed my perspective of thinking about competition, because I'd always thought about it from the perspective of the person who is competing, right? What do I win? If I win, what do I lose? How long will this take me? Et cetera. And the structural science actually thinks of it from the point of the organizer of the competition,

which makes you see it much differently. For example, if you decided you wanted to increase physical fitness in your town, you might have a 5K, but you want everyone to become more physically fit, not just elite athletes. So it's a 5K run, walk, or crawl, and everybody gets a medal so that everyone can feel like they're accomplishing something and no one will say, that's too hard, I can't do it. Now, if you do that, though, the elite performers, the serious runners, aren't going to sign up for that race because it's not a challenge. It's not interesting to them. There's no actual competition, right?

They're going to be insulted that everybody gets a trophy. If you want to, as that organizer, not find everybody gets involved, but who are my best performers? You know, if you're a college scouting for teams or increasing, you know, elite performance, now you maybe only want 30% of the people to come home with a medal, and you're going to increase entrance fees. So what you as the organizer want changes the competition, and that will then change who is willing to compete in the first place.

Let's talk about that, everybody gets a trophy stuff. I mean, people have talked about that a lot over the last several years, and everybody has their opinion. My opinion mine. Yeah, I'm sure you do. My opinion is that it hurts more than it helps. But how does it hurt? I mean, except to demotivate people, what else does it do? Well, I should say I hate programs where everybody gets a trophy. I hate them. I hate them.

And I actually was Switzerland. I was neutral before having written, you know, actually two books relating to motivation. One was about kids. One was about competition. And I really didn't go in hating it. The science that I had learned, that's what actually catalyzed my profound hatred of it. And I think, first of all,

yes, it's demotivating, especially for your elite performer. But I think there's some moral lessons, right? I mean, great competition is about pushing people to your best, right? And improving. And I think that over time, for kids, everybody getting a trophy at every single they do is teaching them nothing is worth doing unless you come home with the medal. We are winners here. Failure is not acceptable. Learning from losing is not acceptable. You must have a public recognition of your success at all times. I think that's really destructive because we're not just

talking one medal one day for one kid. We're talking medals every season, multiple medals, even at a day-long tournament just for being there. So I think that that's a really actually amping up competition. And actually a study that came out last month was looking at rising levels of perfectionism with millennials. They just can't handle mistakes. They can't handle failure. And I wondered, almost immediately, is part of it because they always get trophies and are always told they're wonderful. So there's a lot to this. It isn't just that you can do more push-ups than me. There's a lot more to this than I think people realize, that being a winner takes a lot to this. It isn't just that you can do more push-ups than me. There's a lot more to this than I think people realize, that being a winner takes a lot of understanding of how to be a winner.

Oh, absolutely. I think those are separate skills. And, you know, five or ten years ago, you would have heard that the key to elite performance was doing a task a million times until it was exactly the same and you did it without thinking. And there is a automation sort of programming and motor and the repetition, there is an advantage of that. But the elite performer is not doing something the same thing every time in the same way. The elite performer, whether we're talking about someone at work or on an athletic contest or whatever, but they're constantly adjusting to the circumstance. They're realizing what they did yesterday doesn't necessarily match exactly what's going on today. And they've got to figure out how to fix that and address that. So adaptability

is a key to that expert and what makes an expert someone who's really shining versus someone who's just solid and kind of reliable but isn't going to change things. The expert's going on the fly and adjusting as they need to. So it turns out that adaptability is a separate skill that we can teach right along with any of the mechanisms and the mechanics. Well, I appreciate the insight. It's particularly interesting now watching the Olympics to get a glimpse into what it is that makes an elite performer or an elite athlete and how we can apply that to our own lives.

Ashley Merriman has been my guest. She is author of the book Top Dog, The Science of Winning and Losing. There is a link to her book in the show notes for this episode. Appreciate you being here, Ashley. Thanks. Thank you so much for having me. It was an honor to get to talk to you. 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. Do you love Disney? Then you are going to love our hit podcast, Disney Countdown. I'm Megan, the Magical Millennial. And I'm the Dapper Danielle.

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It's pretty easy to make the case that as a culture, we are getting ruder and nastier to each other. Why is that? What has caused so many people, it seems, to have an opinion on just about everything, feel the need to share that opinion, and then on top of that, the need to villainize and attack anybody who disagrees with that opinion. Is this going to continue to get worse? Can we do something about it? Danny Wallace is a man who is concerned about this. He is the author of several books. His newest is called F You Very Much, Understanding the Culture of Rudeness and What We Can Do About It. Hey, Danny, so where did this

come from? What's the cause of all of this? You know, you can blame it on almost anything. The rise of social media is an obvious one. And there is just this sense that we all have to be heard. There is a certain arrogance, I think, to it. And I think we're celebrating the wrong things as well. Certainly over here in Britain, there's a phrase people use all the time, which is, I'm only being honest. You know, I'm just telling it like it is.

I'm just saying what other people are thinking. And I think if you're doing that, you have to sort of ask yourself, why are other people only thinking it? You know, does it need to be said in this way and in this manner? So, you know, I think there is a gradual coarsening of debate that perhaps we're all a little bit guilty of. We all want to be heard. It's just happening more and more.

I love that. Well, why are other people not saying it? I like it. Maybe there's a point there. Maybe you ought to not say it, too. Yeah, people not say it. Well, there is something a little British about that, you know. It could be, and I am very British in that way. accused me of this, a man named Brad Blanton, who is a pioneer of what's called radical honesty. And he sees politeness as being almost deceitful. Why am I not saying the rude thing if I'm sort of

thinking it? And so to sort of test that theory, I did fly to Germany, not just because the Germans have a reputation for telling it like it is, but also because there was a radical honesty course happening there. So their idea is that if you see someone whose haircut you do not approve of, rather than ignoring it or saying, no, it looks nice, you know, you're supposed to say, I do not like your haircut. And I found my time on that German radical honesty course one of the most excruciating and embarrassing

and counterintuitive experiences I've ever had. So perhaps, yeah, there is a point. Perhaps I am repressed. But that's a great example because, you know, what's the point? Why insult somebody's haircut when it doesn't matter and all you're going to do is hurt somebody's feelings? What's the point? Why insult somebody's haircut when it doesn't matter, and all you're going to do is hurt somebody's feelings? What's the point in that? Well, absolutely.

And I think it's far better to live in a society where we have empathy and we think about other people's feelings. So we're celebrating, I feel, the wrong things at the moment. We're celebrating people for their, in quotes, honesty, whereas actually they're just asking us to stand around and applaud them for their honesty, which, you know, is tantamount to applauding them for just being rude. Don't you think, though, that while it does seem that people are ruder and nastier to each other, that on the other hand, we also have people who take such great offense at everything

that you can't look at them the wrong way without them being offended. And that's got to stop too. Well, I certainly feel that we've gone too far in the offense that we pretend to have taken at almost anything. And I think that it's very, very unhelpful. Some people are going out of their way to be rude, and they should be called out on that. We should shine a spotlight on it.

You know, there's a thing called the looking glass self, coined by Horton Cooley, and that's basically, as humans, we're always looking for how we are being perceived by other people. You know, am I coming across well? Does this person like me? Have I offended them? So that is a very, very important thing in human interaction.

And when we confuse it by being offended by everything all the time and demanding apologies and demanding that the specific phrases that we have in our heads are being used by people who may never have heard those phrases before. That's just noise, which really confuses everything and makes it much harder to make valid points about the rudeness of others. What do you say when someone says, in their radical honesty kind of way, that if you see something you don't like, you should be radically honest about it. And you would say, well, wait a minute, what?

What would you say? Well, so if they're saying that to me, then I would sort of remind them that society, to function properly, needs a certain amount of lubrication. And we've developed these techniques for millennia that are unwritten rules. And they're unwritten because we don't need to write them down because they make such perfect sense. They work. So little things like making sure we say please and thank you. Or if we're opening a door and there's someone running towards that door, we can just take a second just to hold that door open for them. can do all these things we can we can be nice so we can consider other people I don't

know what good it does the person whose haircut I don't like to be told I don't like their haircut I don't see what the real positive is the argument they would make is that by being completely honest I'm going to break through to a whole new level of friendship with that person because there won't be any lies between us. They'll know exactly where I'm coming from. Whereas from my point of view, I don't want to be friends with that person because they're rude.

Right, exactly. And you know what? I bet you they've had a bad haircut once or twice in their life and probably didn't like it if somebody said to them, I hate your haircut. It's probably what drove them to this sociopathic behavior. You're going to find a history of terrible haircuts. But also, when people are radically honest, when they're rude, as we might more commonly call it, it creates a conflict that need not be there. Well, absolutely.

And I think there's even a confusion about just that word honest, because very often when people are putting these opinions out on Twitter or, you know, at dinner pies or whatever, they're confusing a lot of different things. A lot of people confuse cynicism with wit. They think they're being funny just by being rude or being disparaging about things. And a lot of people say they're being honest. When they're not being honest, they're just finding some opinion that makes them stand out so that they can look a little bit smarter. So very often, it's really not about honesty. It's just about sometimes ego, sometimes, I suppose, the sense that they're not being taken seriously.

You know, there's a lot of strange things that lead someone to become, you know, what we term rude. Right. But because people are rude, it often results in wanting revenge. I mean, if somebody's a jerk to me, you think, well, maybe I ought to be a jerk right back. Well, yeah, we trade almost like stocks and shares on respect, basically. And when someone is rude to us, you're right, revenge is a very interesting word to use, because if someone commits a crime against us, if they rob our house, or if they shoot our dog, we don't immediately want to shoot their dog. We want justice. But when someone is rude to us, we tend to want revenge, because we want to either drag them down to how they've made us feel, or we want to claw our way

back up to a sort of, you know, a level seat with them. And, you know, in my research, I actually asked people, thousands of people, whether they had ever felt the need to take revenge on someone who'd been rude to them, and further, how they had done that if they had. And the results were sort of, some were funny, some were playful,

but some were quite dark. So it would go from someone going, yes, you know, I took revenge by letting a dog lick a sausage. I was about to serve them in a restaurant. Just some very weird, surreal ones like, you know, a plumber, I think it was, to take revenge on another plumber, just turned up early for work and turned all the other guys equipment upside down Which is just a bit weird, but it made him feel better But then it got darker and it was things like I sabotage them at work I slashed their tires and one person

Slept with someone's partner so these slights, these little digs into a fragile person or an ego can mean that we take real revenge on them, because we feel that that rudeness has got right to the core of who we are, and it doesn't sit well with us, and we want to get back to where we thought we were. Well, road rage is the perfect example. I mean, people go, people pull guns out and shoot each other because they got cut off. I mean, it's like, wait a minute, this is ridiculous. Well, here's an interesting thing about road rage. If you are, you know, in your car later on, you're driving home, and you see someone in front of you who happens to have a bumper sticker, avoid that person. Because the very act of putting a bumper sticker on your car means that you consider that car like part of your home territory.

You've personalized it. It's not just a metal box to get you from A to B to U. It's part of who you are. And so if someone cuts you up and you're one of those people, you're much more likely to take great offense and much more likely to try and get revenge on them, whether that's, you know, a hand gesture, some fruitless shouting, or as you say, you know, loading your gun. And in America, and I lived in America for a year, last year, and something that frustrated me as a British person was very rarely in Los Angeles where I was living did anyone thank me for doing a good deed for them, for letting them in at traffic or for pausing to allow them to make a maneuver. They wouldn't wave or nod.

They'd sometimes just look at me, but they would never say thank you. And in Britain, we sort of trade on that. And something has developed organically in Britain that hasn't yet happened in America, as far as I can see, which I feel speaks to all this and seems to have tempered a lot of the road rage that could happen, which is when you have made a mistake when you're driving. Maybe you've cut someone up and you didn't mean to. Maybe you're trying to change lanes and you've just done it inelegantly. You flash your hazard lights for just a couple of seconds. It might even be illegal. I don't know. But everyone does it over here. And it means either sorry or thank you. But what it really does is say i'm a person

and i'm thanking you another person for inconveniencing you or for doing me a favor and you know when they don't flash their hazards oh my god you hate them you absolutely hate that person you go from from zero to a hundred but the second they treat you as a human being all that anger dissipates. And I really think that it's a technique that really has led to the decrease in road rage. So what do we do about this? You've researched this pretty well. So what's the suggestion and the recommendation? It's sort of that looking glass self again. It's kind of like, you know, holding a mirror up to someone's behavior.

There are ways of highlighting what they've done. There are ways of shining a spotlight on it, but in a non-aggressive way, with a bit of grace and a bit of empathy. You can very often end that strain. So you can do it on a very low-key, everyday level, just by pointing out politely that someone's being a bit rude, but maybe with a smile, maybe finding a joke in it, diffusing the situation. There are people who have done it in very spectacular ways, though. There's a guy who

used to be the mayor of Bogota at a time where the city was pretty much seen as the most chaotic on the planet. And everyone was just driving however they wanted, parking their cars on the sidewalk, jaywalking left, right, and center. No one was obeying kind of the rules. And the more people who weren't obeying it, the more it sent a message out to everyone else that they could behave however they wanted. And so he did a very, very odd thing that I think is absolutely genius. He employed an army of mime artists, and he sent these mime artists out onto the streets of Bogota with a very simple task. If you see someone behaving rudely, show them. So people would find themselves parking on a sidewalk, inconveniencing everybody, and then they would suddenly be surrounded

by dozens of mime artists all just pointing and shaking their heads at the guy in the car and then the public would feel buoyed by this and there would be a sort of joke to it so people would gain confidence and be able to mock those people as well

or someone jaywalking might look behind them and they're being followed by three or four mime artists walking in exactly the same way as they are. And that is a very odd but brilliant way of highlighting behavior that shouldn't be happening and shining that spotlight on it in a powerful but quite playful way that then sort of reinforces the ideas that, look, there are rules. There may not be written down, but this isn't the way we should be behaving. So, you know, I think that if we could employ an army of mime artists in every city in the world, I think the world would be a better place. Yeah. Well, and it also just seems that when you're rude,

you're a lot less likely to get whatever it is you want than when you're nice, because people cooperate with nice people, and they don't cooperate when someone calls them names and calls them a jerk. Yeah, and we live in a system that requires cooperation. So when we have people, you know, kind of at the top of the country who are, you know, saying this is an okay way to behave. We can be disparaging towards minority groups. We can give dismissive nicknames to almost anyone we like.

We can choose whatever words we want to use, so long as we're telling it like it is and not being politically correct. It sends a message to everyone else that, yeah, I can act that way as well. And then they teach their children that, and their children grow up doing all these things. And pretty soon you realize that you've coarsened the culture to the point that for generations, you know, people are going to be affected by this.

It's confusing. Maybe we just need to write these rules down. Well, I'll say this as politely as I can, so please don't take offense, but we're out of time. But it's such an important topic because it seems to me, anyway, that things are getting out of hand, that people are getting so nasty with each other, and that it would be nice to bring civility back, that we could be nice to each other and expect people to be nice back. It would just make life easier.

Danny Wallace has been my guest. His book is F.U. Very Much, Understanding the Culture of Rudeness and What We Can Do About It. There's a link to his book in the show notes. Thanks, Danny. Thank you very much. Cheers. There is a scam, a rip-off, and you have been a target if you've ever gotten an email solicitation for mail enhancement products. If you check your junk mail, there's probably one in there right now. And if you type on the internet, mail enhancement, there is no shortage of websites

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And that is something you should know. We're on Facebook and Twitter, and we publish content there that you don't hear in the podcast that I know you'll like. And if you like us on social media, you'll see posts that remind you to come back and listen to the next episode. I'm Micah Ruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know. Welcome to the small town of Chinook,

where faith runs deep and secrets run deeper. In this new thriller, religion and crime collide when a gruesome murder rocks the isolated Montana community. Everyone is quick 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, unearthing secrets that leave Ruth torn between her duty to the law,

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