The art and science of trash talk with Rafi Kohan
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Hey everyone, it's Adam Grant. Welcome back to Rethinking, my podcast on the science of what makes us tick with the TED Audio Collective. I'm an organizational psychologist, and I'm taking you inside the minds of fascinating people to explore new thoughts and new ways of thinking.

My guest today is Rafi Kohan. He's a journalist and the author of the book Trash Talk, the only book about destroying your rivals that isn't total garbage. It's a fascinating and delightful case that although the term is fairly new, the art form goes way back.

There's something fundamental about trash talk to human beings. And we've been talking trash basically as long as we've been talking. It goes back to the Bible. It goes back to the Homeric poems. You can find examples, you know, across culture, across geography and throughout time. Rafi has been a sports writer, an editor, a freelance journalist, and he directed The Atlantic's creative studio, Rethink. He also convinced me to rethink my assumptions about the purpose of trash talk.

Rafi, how do we trash talk on a podcast? Do I tell you you're going to bomb? Honestly, the most surprising thing about receiving your email was learning that you could read. I will say that I was appreciative of your trash talking efforts over email because a lot of people say that their instinct is when we first encounter one another or we talk is to talk some crap to me, but then they don't do it. But you actually did it. You said you are to book writing what Shaq is to free throw shooting.

Which, by the way, I've written two books. So if I'm 50%, that's not so bad, right? You know, at least you write one good one. You found the veiled compliment there. That's a high hit rate for creative work. I was looking for a way to positively frame it. You know, I needed to be able to go home without crying that night.

I have to try to come up with something at least mildly entertaining. So I felt like a lame effort at trash talk was the easiest opening volley. Although I wouldn't even call it a lame effort, right? Any sort of trash talk is inherently a provocation of some kind.

right? There's some sort of violation. I mean, even if I say that's lame, I could still say, well, but that still is upsetting to me because this is a person who I admire and respect, and he's putting down my work, even if in a lame hackneyed trash talk kind of way. It's all about how I receive it, right? Putting out the provocation, putting out the incitement is really only half of the trash talk battle. It's all about that response, all about the uptake.

Did you have a traumatic moment of being insulted on a basketball court as a kid? What's the origin story of why do you care so much about trash talking? Because I think everybody thinks it's an interesting and an entertaining phenomenon. Few people would think to write a whole book about it. Well, actually, nobody would think to write a whole book about it because this is the first ever book about trash talk.

And that's why it's the only one that's not total garbage. That's exactly right. That's why I felt so confident in my trash talking subtitle is because it's easy to insult everyone when everyone includes no one. I'm not really a trash talker personally. You know, the way that I've used trash talk on the basketball court is actually more to be self-deprecating and adopt the kind of like underdog posture. Like if I'm guarding somebody who's way taller than me and I managed to strip the ball from them,

I'll say something to the effect of, oh man, you can't even get by me? Like, that's embarrassing. But, you know, I love trash talk. I'm a child of the 90s, grew up a New York Knicks fan of Pat Riley and John Starks and Anthony Mason Knicks. And the idea was that there is something so charismatic, so magnetic, so sort of dangerous about trash talk in some ways, at least as we kind of understand it. But that sort of speaks to the idea that we actually don't understand it.

Right. Within the American context specifically, we invented this new term in the 1980s and really sort of popularized it in the 1990s of trash talk to describe this ancient form of human behavior that we just never quite named in that way. And we were somehow rebranding it, recasting it specifically with the influence of black American oral traditions like the Dozen's.

like toasting. And because of our larger cultural and racial context, we kind of stigmatized it as a result. And therefore, we're taking trash talk at its word and not really understanding what's happening beneath the surface. As soon as I started thinking about trash talk as something that's been part of human interaction from day one, I immediately thought of Shakespeare.

Like biting your thumb at someone is trash talk. You're provoking them just like you were describing without even needing a word. You're basically saying they're not up to a fight. You're going to destroy them. So at the most basic level, trash talk is the presentation of a challenge, right? It suggests to your opponent, right?

that they do not have what it takes to succeed. They cannot win. And this adds stress to a confrontation, right? It literally adds anxiety. It puts more pressure on your opponent's performance because the follow-up question is, can you handle this?

Can you perform in the way that you're supposed to perform, the way that you need to, in spite of this added pressure and anxiety? Can you focus on the things that you're supposed to focus on? Are you going to become distracted by task-irrelevant cues like me insulting your mother? Can you self-regulate, right? Can you get yourself where you need to be? I think that a lot of people hear trash talk, and especially if they haven't spent a lot of time around competitive team sports before.

they think it's bullying or verbal abuse of some kind. For me, that's a mistaken assumption. So they exist on a continuum for sure, right? It is uncivil behavior. And in fact, you can trash talk by verbally abusing someone. So the question is, what are the sort of qualities or features that kind of mediate that, that allow it to become something else?

And for me, I think about a few things. One is that it exists within a magic circle, right? Johann Huizinga talks about playgrounds sort of being these spaces apart from the other space where like new rules apply that are distinct from the rules beyond. So therefore, when you're playing in the NFL, it's okay to tackle a guy and not get arrested for assault, right? Same if you're in a boxing match. If you're

talking trash within an acceptable space, you can say things that would cut out a person and that aren't necessarily considered to be or shouldn't be taken as insulting or abusive.

The second one would be opting in, on some level, opting in. And there certainly can be argument about what qualifies as opting in, right? When Charlie Villanueva was playing in the NBA, was he opting in to Kevin Garnett allegedly calling him a cancer patient because he has alopecia? I don't know. But there's some level of opting in, that you're participating in this voluntarily, or as they say in the legal realm, right, you're coming to the nuisance. And the third, which I think is absolutely imperative,

is an opportunity to respond, right? You're inviting a response. It's a level playing field to equal competitors. And therefore, there's also accountability at play. So you can say something, but you also have to stand behind it. And I have the opportunity to come back at you for it. While trash talk invites a response, bullying is punching down and seeking to silence.

The boundaries on that can be slippery though, right? We're talking 90s basketball. Michael Jordan was not above trash talking players who were far below his ability level. There's so much gray area in all of this space. There's no question. And you could argue, and I think you would be right to argue, that he probably would have been a better leader if he had other modes of leadership, right? If he didn't just try to navigate these social relationships and seeing who could hang with them by testing them via verbal abuse, which can be a function of trash talking.

But they are both players in the NBA, right? It's not like David Stern or a team owner, right, telling the 12th guy on the bench that he really stinks.

Yeah, that's a good point. And it reminds me of probably the most interesting research I've read on trash talking, which I imagine you're intimately familiar with. My colleagues, Jeremy Yip, Maurice Schweitzer, and Samir Nurmohamed did this great paper on trash talking where they found that if you're competing, trash talking can motivate effort, but it demotivates when you're cooperating. And I think that's exactly the distinction you're highlighting here, that it's probably not a good idea to berate Scottie Pippen if you're Michael Jordan. Yeah.

Yes and no. I love that paper so much. It was like foundational for me in terms of my reporting, just in terms of the way that it defined this basic function of trash talk as raising the psychological stakes of competition, right? It creates meaning, like it's existential. It makes something matter. And I love that so much. There is a difference between in-group and out-group trash talk, right? When you were talking trash about an outsider or you hear it from an outsider, that can strengthen the bonds of identity of

of the in-group. But within a group, there can be real value, pro-social value of trash talk too. But you have to be more careful with it. As Zora Neale Hurston said of the dozens, "It is a risky pleasure." If you're talking trash to one another, what are the protective mechanisms on a team? I mean, trust is essential to all of this. Do I trust that you're doing it in a way to make me better, to get me to raise my game, to challenge me?

And will there be sort of recovery period afterwards where you'll dap me up afterwards or give me a hug and be like, hey man, that was great, right? So that I can reappraise it. The failed mental model, as they put it, is that people didn't anticipate that trash talk would in fact raise the motivation levels of the targets of trash talk. You can use that within a team to great effect. I mean, just think about practice, right? Getting people to come practice when they might not

want to practice. That's a terrific use of intra-team trash talk. I had an old boss who would say, don't hold a grudge, use a grudge. It's surprising to a lot of people that the very thing I'm doing that I think is going to give me an edge over my competitor is actually potentially going to backfire.

But it also turns out to be more complicated than that, as you know, because in that paper also, you're upping the stakes, as you said. You're creating a sense of rivalry between you and an opponent. And that can motivate them to work harder or play harder. But it also raises the likelihood that they'll cheat because they're willing to do whatever it takes to make sure that you lose.

as you said, it can motivate someone, but it also makes them more petty. It also makes them potentially act less ethically. It can narrow their attentional focus in a way that could be more directed in trying to retaliate against you. Again, that's the pettiness as opposed to focusing on the task at hand. But so then the question is, what's your goal with this? If you're

an antagonistic trash talker, maybe you want me to become a little bit pettier, a little bit less ethical, because then maybe I will foul you in a way that will get me kicked out of the game. Right? This is Zenity and Zidane. Yes. And Marco Matarazzi. Absolutely. Exactly. Absolutely. I mean, Zidane gets, he ends up headbutting Matarazzi and gets kicked out of what, the last game of his career in the World Cup final? The sports biggest stage.

And his team loses in penalty kicks. I mean, the consequences couldn't have been more severe. Well, this raises the question of how to respond to trash talk. When I teach emotional intelligence, I show the Zidane clip and we raise the question in class of, okay, what do you do in that situation? And I think for me, what's clear is that Zidane has an emotional trigger.

which is he's been raised in a culture of honor, and if you insult a female member of his family, that is not trash talk. That is the worst form of disrespect. And he's gonna lose it. And we've seen him do this before in competition. And what I encourage students to do is to come up with a script to identify their emotional trigger. What value could be violated by an insult or an unpleasant interaction? And then choose a script that would allow them to better handle that situation.

If I were coaching Zidane, I would say, okay, look, you should have a script that goes something like this the next time somebody does that. I wonder why he's saying that. Maybe Matarazzi doesn't even know my sister. Maybe he's just trying to get me to get kicked out of the game because he knows he can't beat me. What would you recommend?

When something happens that's offensive, like even when we know it's happening or could happen, we are sort of hardwired to be offended, right? This is the fundamental attribution error, as it's known, right? We mistake, you know, the context for the behavior, or as Fritz Heider put it, behavior engulfs the field. And we simply have a hard time not taking it personally. So the response to trash talk is to display mentally tough behavior, right?

Mental toughness is basically about self-awareness and self-regulation. So as you're saying, having some sort of cue for yourself, some kind of psychological cue when you can identify when you've been distracted, you're getting upset in a way that's not helpful, or your internal state is either rising or falling below your optimal zone of functioning, which describes sort of where our peak performance states are. And then the ability to self-regulate, to get yourself back to where you need to be.

In the army, they teach soldiers to ask themselves a question, which is what's important now? Anger is in the past. You're responding to something that already happened.

What can I focus on right now in this moment? And even if the task seems overwhelming, which by the way is one of the things that Trash Talk can do, is it can overwhelm a person, make someone feel like the demands of performance are more than they can handle. So then you shrink it down to size. You say, "I don't have to worry about all that. I just need to focus on this and I can handle this." And then you move on to the next thing. And acceptance is really key. I'm not trying to ignore that Matarazzi said this thing, because when you try to suppress a thought, it only gives it more oxygen.

You accept that something was said, and then you choose how to respond to it. Is this useful for me, or can I disregard it? And the way to disregard, again, is not to ignore or suppress, but to focus on something else. And I think this is how Zidane would frame this, is that it actually brings up more of a moral question than a performative one, which is, how do you square...

performance imperatives, competitive imperatives versus moral imperatives. He has said that he responded in the right way. He said he would never apologize to moderati. He would rather die. But it does speak to a larger question, which is when people are crossing a line with the things that they say and potentially shifting societal norms in a way, then what is our responsibility to respond in a way that takes us out of performance and brings us more into sort of like a social and moral and ethical realm?

I love your question. So one of the things that's fascinating to me and that I've been thinking about, there are places where I think competitive drives are extremely high and there is no trash talk. I spent a lot of years in the world of springboard diving. I have never once seen trash talk. And I was trying to figure out why that is. And I had a couple of initial hypotheses. One is,

It's already a sport where so much rides on tiny things that it almost feels cruel to put that pressure on someone. Another is there's just a strong norm of civility in diving. You know, everyone's facing fear. Everybody is dealing with pain. We've all had the experience of getting lost in midair and then belly flopping or back smacking in a way that hurts for hours, if not days. And it's just, it's mean to do that to somebody else.

So this is all very specific to diving, but it raises a broader question of what have you learned around why trash talk evolves in some environments and not others? And what are the features of a context that make it acceptable versus unacceptable?

First thing I thought of was Michael Phelps, and obviously he's not a diver, but there's a famous picture of him from before a 2016 race at the Summer Olympics where he is just under a hood, I think. He's got headphones on, and he is staring daggers at his opponent, or at least everyone assumed that he was staring daggers at his opponent. What he actually said he was doing was- Phelps face. Phelps face. I remember that picture. That's right. And he was psyching himself up. He was getting into his own zone of optimal functioning, right? That-

In an individual sports, especially one where things do ride on such technicalities, I think everybody is in their own head so much already that you might not necessarily be thinking about how to throw off someone else. There is already so much on the line for yourself. It goes back to the point that norms matter so much. And as you said, there's perhaps a norm of civility in competitive diving. What I think about is the early days of mixed martial arts.

And nowadays, mixed martial arts, UFC in particular, is maybe ground zero for the world's most line-crossing trash talk. But back 30 years ago, 25 years ago even, there was no trash talk in the UFC, none in the MMA, because it was built on values like respect and honor from the individual martial arts that were cobbled together to create MMA.

But eventually, there was someone who crossed the line. And when they pushed beyond this norm, people had an opportunity to either go with it or to push back against it. And everyone saw that. And they're like, yeah, man, I'm here for that. Like, I'm definitely down for that kind of energy.

It becomes a spectator sport. And all of a sudden you realize there's entertainment value in trash talking. If you're doing an obscure sport like diving, there's not a lot of incentive to do it. Right. Well, you don't have the pre-fight press conferences and weigh-ins. And that really speaks to more of a marketing imperative. This idea that trash talk can be used as a tool of business.

When you raise the stakes of competition, when you create a rivalry relationship, you're investing people in the outcome of this contest in a way they wouldn't otherwise be invested in it. I actually spoke to a lot of folks in the amateur wrestling world who bemoaned the fact that there's not more trash talk because they would like to have more attention around their sport. But they say, oh, everybody says it's unsportsmanlike. That's not part of what we do here. So therefore, it doesn't happen.

Yeah, it's interesting. I feel like business is full of these examples. Like I remember when the GM CEO called the Mercedes C-Class very average, which is hilarious. But going back to the diving example for a second, I don't want to say that trash talking is inherently bad, but I always loved the fact that in a sport that was competitive, that people were so kind to each other.

And it's one of the things that made diving so enjoyable is you felt like even the people that I spent a whole year training to beat, I was still cheering for them. And I still wanted them to dive their best and I wanted to beat them on my own merit. But I wonder if one of the reasons that that arose is at meets, you're training with your competitor. You're standing in line at the same board, you're going through the same experience. And I think about so many sports where you practice separately from your competitors. There's a clear boundary there.

I want to build an environment where respect is a core value. And if people are going to trash talk and bring in that little bit of incivility, they do it in a way that everybody thinks is fun and within the acceptable bounds of interaction. How do you think about creating that?

I think that's important for any kind of trash talk environment in general, is to create these kinds of protective mechanisms that allow for some kind of psychological safety, right? That we can go at one another without feeling like we're actually being threatened by someone. I think about it as a safe space to do unsafe things. And I think depending on what you're doing or where you're doing it, that space might change.

But I think you need to feel supported, right? You need to feel like someone actually has your best interest in mind, right? The path to mental toughness requires vulnerability. And to be vulnerable, we need to feel safe in some ways. We need to feel supported. We need to feel that context. And I will say that...

About the diving stuff, you know, the way you describe it, I mean, is it truly free of all trash talk? Because you are, you're seeing one another. Like, is anybody not sort of like winking to their opponent when they're about to take a dive or saying, hey, can you do this? Wow, that's amazing. It really is. Never. I think it would be dishonorable, honestly, which is the way you described the early UFC days. Right. I have a hunch, same thing is true in gymnastics and figure skating.

Like these very precarious sports. But maybe I'm wrong. For people who are listening, wouldn't be able to see it, but I shook my head vigorously at figure skating. And that's just because there's a story about Katerina Witt, former champion figure skater. They would have these free skate times where everybody would be on the ice and they would have three minutes, whatever, to go through their routines. And what Katerina Witt would do while other people were rehearsing their routines is she would improvise a dance to their routines. Right.

And people would be so intimidated by her doing this that it would psych them out for the competition. So is that trash talk? I mean, it's a kind of psychological gamesmanship for sure. I don't know if it's trash talk, but I think it's a sister of it. This raises another question, which is about gender and trash talk. But

Trash Talk seems to be pretty vibrant in women's sports as well. I think about the Angel Reese, Caitlin Clarke, Haley Van Lith situation. What have you learned about gender differences in the prevalence of Trash Talk and also in the way it's used? This behavior is...

is probably more socialized than it is innate, right? In terms of the way we express aggression, right? The way that we feel comfortable expressing aggression based on how it will be received or perceived sort of more widely. And you could see this in the reaction to Angel Reese and Caitlin Clark, the kind of attention it got. There's also some racial component there, of course,

but that we made a bigger deal out of that than we would have made a big deal out of Anthony Edwards going at Kevin Durant just in the playoff series that just happened, which was an incredible trash talk. But again, at the most basic level, talking trash to someone

is an invitation to compete. It raises the stakes. It's a presentation of a challenge and asking, can you handle this? Can you raise your game? It's a way to almost get the best out of your opponent, right? A rival will push you further than you can go on your own. Let me transition here to a lightning round. We're looking for a sentence at most, ideally, and you can skip one if you can't handle it. Okay. And I'm pretty sure you can't. Okay.

You mentioned trash talk in the Bible. What is your favorite line of trash talk there? David to Goliath, I will strike you down and cut off your head. That one I think came to fruition. Yeah, it worked out. He baited him pretty good. What is your favorite modern trash talk line?

I don't know if this qualifies as modern because it's from the 1970s, but it's modern by biblical standards. Shep Messing was a former goalkeeper for the U.S. men's Olympic team. And he had a strategy after halftime of games when he was competing in the NASL, which is a different league. He would go up to someone on the other team and he would say to them something to the effect of,

I hope you didn't hear. There's a fire in your neighborhood. Something to take their mind off the competition. And of course, there's no smartphones, no way to check it. And as he put it to me, he wanted to make them worried, not angry. Do you have a favorite piece of trash talk from a movie or a TV show?

He got game with Denzel Washington and Ray Allen when they're playing one-on-one toward the end. And he says, I've got nothing to do with your game. And the point is, you're responsible for how you respond. Stepping a little beyond trash talk, what is the worst advice you've ever gotten?

The worst advice I ever got is write what you know. And I know that might seem like good advice, and perhaps it is for some people, but for me, it felt very limiting. Whereas I, what I really enjoy is talking to lots of people and learning lots of things and writing what other people know, because I certainly didn't know any of this stuff a couple of years ago. I wholeheartedly agree with that. Write what you want to learn. Yeah. Or write what you love. Yeah. What is something you've rethought lately?

Stress, and specifically the role of stress in performance, and thinking about stress and our stress responses as actually a resource, something that's helping us be at our best, as opposed to something that represents a threat or that could take away from our performance. Give us a hot take. It could be an unpopular opinion, a rant, or a hill you are very eager to die on.

- Breakfast is overrated. - I knew you were gonna suck at hot takes. - As I was talking, I started to think about French toast, which is one of my favorite foods. And I realized maybe I was going a little overboard. - What's a question you have for me? - I would love to know if there have been times in your life when you think you would have benefited from a little more trash talk. - There have. And that's how you ace the lightning round.

Oh, I killed it. Well done. Am I allowed to ask a follow-up? Yeah. What were those times? I think one of the times when I would have really benefited from Trash Talk was actually when I was near panic mode after a rehearsal for my first TED Talk.

I gathered about 40 people who I felt had very high standards. And it was a mix of people. Some had given TED Talks. Some were great speakers, great writers, people who had sort of been very constructive critics and tough coaches on my work in the past. And I pulled them all together and I gave a practice talk and it bombed. Bombed. And it

Almost everybody in the group either had helpful suggestions for improvement or words of encouragement. And I think I would have been more motivated by somebody saying, you know what? I actually think you have no business giving a TED Talk. And let me tell you all the reasons why.

Wow. Using the disrespect as a form of motivation. Yeah. It would have immediately activated the underdog effect that Samir Nurmohamed talks about and studies so well. I know I would have said to that room, well, you don't know what I'm capable of. Yeah. And I'm going to show you. And it would have pulled you out from the internal to the external, most likely. Instead of ruminating about what went wrong, becoming more anxious, you become focused on the challenge that was presented externally.

That's a really good point. I think it would have activated a future focus instead of past. And I think what was interesting was all the encouragement just left me wondering, do people just feel bad? Because it was so bad. And I think it really left me wondering, can I trust them? Can I do this?

And I would have been better off with them, as you say, giving me the challenge. Yeah. Because I love a good challenge. So yes, I could have benefited from more trash talk. And if any of that group of 40-some are listening, you all failed me and you suck. You're massive disappointments. And I can't believe we're still friends. I was going to say the same thing. So it's been over a century since Yerkes Dodson told us there's an optimal level of stress. And

And we all know what it means to have too much stress, but you can also have too little. Yes. Where you're not focused, you're not motivated, you don't care. And I think the research on performance pressure that followed has very much tracked that curve. With creativity, for example, we know that there's a curvilinear relationship between time pressure and the novelty and quality of ideas that people generate. You have too much pressure and you end up having to just sort of...

just rush ahead with whatever is easy. But you have too little pressure and sometimes you don't feel like you have to start. Right. Or you have to give your full attention or you have to kick into high gear to make sure that you can finish. It's really hard to figure out what the optimal level of stress or pressure is. You spend a lot of time thinking about this. Yeah. What can you teach us? There is such a thing as an individual zone of optimal functioning, which is in

an individualized and personally appropriate level of anxiety that we each require to be at our best. And individual zones can be informed by things, as you said, not just by who the person is, but also by the specific task at hand and almost any other factor, any other condition you can put on performance. But what's interesting is that what they've also found in subsequent pressure profiling that they've done is that people with narcissism are also really stress hardy.

because they don't mind being in the spotlight, right? They want to take it on. Narcissists also have a lot of practice dealing with narcissistic injury. Yes. Anything is a potential ego threat. Yes. And so they get to build up that stress response over time, potentially. Yes, and the key was that

You had to train toward the type of behavior that you were looking for. To a narcissist, you might say something like, wouldn't it be so great if you could just not swing at the first 10 balls that come your way? You know, like not taking unnecessary risk, right? Learning where the right times to take risk are. Whereas the punishment sensitive person, they train to the point where it's not actually taking a risk.

I've listened to many of your podcasts, but one of the ones with Lisa Feldman Barrett, you were talking specifically about how sort of trying to reappraise stress in that performance moment and feeling the nerves and anxiety and even telling yourself, I can handle this. I'm excited. I'm determined.

doesn't necessarily help that much when you're really feeling more than you want to feel. It still helps, right? But what you really need to do is have inoculated yourself to that stress ahead of time. That's the key, right? Having sort of the mastery of that skill execution and having practiced those skills under duress and specifically in the conditions in which you're going to be performing.

And so when you do those things, then when you get to that moment of performance, you can self-regulate to that optimal state. This is where I think about Ali Crum's research.

where teaching people the stress is enhancing as opposed to stress is debilitating mindset actually allows them to use it more effectively because instead of fighting against the arousal that they're feeling or the anxiety, they're able to say, this is providing me with additional motivation. Yes. Challenge versus threat is a spectrum. It's not like a dichotomy, but you can slide yourself closer to that end of the spectrum toward challenge from threat. I think the reappraisal of what is the meaning of this spectrum

stressor is a lot easier than saying, let me get rid of the emotion or the intense arousal altogether. Absolutely. The story we tell ourselves about the things that we're experiencing and the meaning we make from it is so critical. And by the way, trash talk speaks so much to this human desire to make meaning, I think.

both in terms of, again, the sort of the creation of rivalry relationships and sort of endowing contests with meaning, but it also exploits our sort of brain's inherent impulse to try to make sense of things, to try to make sense of what we're taking in. I was doing an event with somebody who I think of as both a friend and a colleague. And I remember our previous conversation just missing a little tension the last time we had been on stage. Like we agreed too much and I wanted a few more sparks to fly.

And without even thinking it through, when we were getting together backstage, the other person made a comment to the effect of, you know, I'm really looking forward to this. It's going to be a lot of fun. And I said, I don't know. We'll see how it goes. Are you up to making it fun? Do you think you're going to say something, you know, challenging and provocative?

And I watched the person's facial expression just deflated. And if I had just said, hey, by the way, I want to make sure we mix it up this time. So, you know, what do you think about maybe making fun of each other a little bit, doing a little friendly teasing, some banter? It would have been received completely differently. Talk to me about that.

He or she wasn't primed for that. Exactly. It was very jarring. Right. I didn't see it until you were talking about building norms and establishing norms of previewing this behavior is really critical if you're not in a context where we both opted in. Yes. Familiarity is an important mediator for stress, actually, right? So it's like when you...

When you experience something that's novel, you'll have a much larger stress response. I think it speaks to something that's interesting about the idea of competition versus cooperation. And that is cooperation is inherent to competition. If you don't have cooperation, you can't have competition. So it's more just saying, let's have a different kind of cooperation here.

That's right. Let's agree on the rules that we can duke it out under a little bit. Yeah, let's agree to disagree. Yeah, exactly. And to disagree passionately. The creation of good faith is really what it is. So that we can, again, on the most basic level, and it's what you were doing, agree to disagree. But first we need to have some good faith about what we're doing here.

It's creating good faith and it's reinforcing goodwill. Yeah, absolutely. To bring us full circle, I think the thing that I love most about the book subtitle that you created...

is you have sent a signal to the whole world. Anybody who interacts with you now knows that you're coming to play ball. It's so nice to give people that kind of permission in some ways, right? Because one, you're saying my guard is down. You can lower your guard too. But also it creates a more instant sense of immediacy with people too.

Right. You can skip the small talk and get right to the trash talk, right? One of the things you can say about trash talk is that it's intimacy masquerading as hostility, especially when it takes place within relationships. Intimacy masquerading as hostility. I will only make fun of you if I like you and think it's appropriate in our relationship. Absolutely. It is a sign of a healthy environment, or it can be. Wow. Yeah.

Well, that is something to rethink. I have so many people that I want to diss right now. I have so many people that I want to hear you diss. And in the meantime, because our Sixers just fell to your necks, you're definitely going down next. Thank you, Rafi. Thank you so much. Loved it. Yeah, me too, man. Looking forward to our paths crossing again. Likewise. I never thought about trash talk as intimacy masquerading as hostility.

And I realized that's what I've always loved about friendly rivalries, is that you can make fun of each other, and you're doing it in good fun. And it's a mark of how much you care about each other. I think that's what a great roast is all about. It's a sign of a healthy relationship that you can insult each other lovingly without taking offense. Rethinking is hosted by me, Adam Grant. This show is part of the TED Audio Collective, and this episode was produced and mixed by Cosmic Standard.

Our producers are Hannah Kingsley-Ma and Asia Simpson. Our editor is Alejandra Salazar. Our fact checker is Paul Durbin. Original music by Hansdale Sue and Allison Leighton Brown. Our team includes Eliza Smith, Jacob Winnick, Samaya Adams, Roxanne Heilash, Banban Cheng, Julia Dickerson, and Whitney Pennington-Rogers.

I mean, at least I don't have giant headphones on. Yeah, which dwarf the size of my head. Yeah. Yeah. Although, you know, I also don't have the luxury of wearing headphones because when you don't have hair, they're really uncomfortable. It presses into the scalp. Exactly. They're not designed to just rest on top of your head. Yeah.

That seems like a market inefficiency that somebody should address. Yeah, except I don't think there's enough demand. All the bald podcasters, although there are a lot of us. Or they're in too great of denial to admit it. I think the last time I did that, I ended up with a giant dent on my head after a two-hour conversation. Right on. Delightful. My denial was erased live.

Support for the show comes from Brooks Running. I'm so excited because I have been a runner, gosh, my entire adult life. And for as long as I can remember, I have run with Brooks Running shoes. Now I'm running with a pair of Ghost 16s from Brooks.

incredibly lightweight shoes that have really soft cushioning. It feels just right when I'm hitting my running trail that's just out behind my house. You now can take your daily run in the Better Than Ever Go 16. You can visit brookscrunning.com to learn more. PR.