Podcasts That Make Us Think: Using Magic Words; Sleepy Makes You Sloppy; Pee Pee As A Weapon

 This week's Podcasts That Make Us Think features the Big Brains podcast talking about the power of words, the Chasing Sleep podcast talking about the lack of it, and The Economics of Everyday Things podcast discussing the power of animal urine.

Words: Choose them carefully

 In the Big Brains podcast for June 15, Wharton School professor Jonah Berger is interviewed about his latest book, Magic Words. In Magic Words, Berger gives readers an inside look at the new science of language and how you can use it. Technological advances in machine learning, computational linguistics, and natural language processing, combined with the digitization of everything from cover letters to conversations, have yielded unprecedented insights.

For example, Berger explains how using the word "could" instead of "should" makes us possibly more creative and more open to solutions.  "Should" focuses on restrictions of behavior and blame.

Berger then talks about the pronoun "you." Berger assesses the difference between these two sentences. 

"Did you do the laundry today?"

"Was the laundry done today?"

Adding the "you" makes the question more accusatory. Without the "you," the sentence becomes more inclusive in determining a completed action.

Berger then illustrates how asking for advice in a professional or personal setting actually demonstrates that you are more confident in your abilities than less competent. Berger negates the powerfully held assumption that using words to ask for advice is a sign of weakness. 

Berger even asserts that something as minor as speaking in the present tense as compared to the past tense can make your words more impactful.

 Sleep affects performance, motivation, and competitiveness

 In the June 27th episode of Chasing Sleep, hosts Adam Shapiro and Katie Lowes discuss sleep and how it impacts our work lives. The co-hosts discuss how pro sports teams now pay much more attention to the sleep schedule of their players. 

When the San Francisco Giants beat the Texas Rangers in the 2010 World Series, Giants manager Bruce Bochy prioritized his players' sleep schedule, especially when traveling to Arlington, Texas for the away games.

It's well known that in the NFL, football teams traveling from the West Coast to the East Coast struggle with winning games, and it may be sleep disruption due to time zone change that impacts performance.

The co-hosts discuss with a noted sleep specialist that the less random a schedule, the better sleep a person will get. Shift work can cause such randomness and disrupt sleep. 

Lack of sleep can also cause a decrease in overall motivation, as the body craves that missing sleep and prioritizes sleep over all other motivating factors in a person's life.

Finally, listeners discover that Ben & Jerry's, the Vermont-based ice cream maker, has a nap room in its facility because the company believes that well-rested employees are healthier and more productive.

I support that stance because I want well-rested people making my Chunky Monkey.

 We're all in on animal urine

In a recent episode of The Economics Of Everyday Things, host Zachary Crockett interviewed the "Pee Man" Ken Johnson, who owns and operates PredatorPee.Com. 

A whitetail deer has around 300 million olfactory sensors. Its sense of smell is 60 times stronger than ours. That means the deer can usually smell you before you’ve seen it. To solve that problem, hunters use an age-old trick: dousing himself with animal pee. And not just any animal pee — it had to be something that didn’t scare the deer away.

Ken Johnson says, "Foxes are naturally occurring animals in the same territory as a deer. But they’re not a predator of a deer. So deer, when they smell a fox, there’s no concern. Hunters use fox urine on their clothing, and they can get closer to the deer. Now, the more inventive hunters will use something as strong as skunk essence."

 At first, his business catered to hunters. Then, Johnson began to notice something strange: he was getting a ton of orders outside of hunting season. He called one of his customers and asked what was up. The customer said, “Oh, yeah, everybody around here uses it to keep rabbits out of their garden.” 

That was a light bulb moment for Johnson.

Johnson relates, "I realized that urine is a communications player in the wild. It’s how wild animals find a mate. It’s how they protect their territory. And it’s how they detect the predator."

Between 1900 and 2020, the deer population in the U.S. grew from around 300,000 to 32 million. All those deer were wreaking havoc on newly-created suburbs and rural developments. A Clemson University report pegged the total damage that deer inflicted on gardens and landscaping at $250 million dollars per year. And that study only looked at 13 states. Homeowners were in desperate need of a solution. And Johnson had just the thing: coyote urine.

Johnson goes to explain, "Our largest customer is our distributor in Japan. He’s been buying our products for 10 to 15 years now. And they use it agriculturally over there to keep wild boar out of the rice paddies."

In 2013, Johnson’s predator urine even helped solve a problem at Denver International Airport. The long-term parking was infested by rabbits. A lot of the car wires are now made with soy. And rabbits love the soy. Johnson had a product he calls “pee shots,” which are small canister canisters with vented caps that you can put in your engine compartment and they worked. No more rabbits in long-term parking.

Johnson admits that some uses of his animal urine products relate to humans. Business owners have purchased his animal urine to spray it on storefronts to keep people from loitering around their businesses. 

There's been no research on what kind of animal urine can keep away crazy politicians who are soaked in conspiracy theories.