When Maps Go Wrong & The Science of Everyday Courage

We’ve all done it — used a big fancy word to sound smarter or more impressive. But does it actually work? Research says no. In fact, the secret to sounding intelligent and confident has nothing to do with big words at all. I’ll explain what is far more powerful. https://www.businessinsider.com/use-simple-language-to-sound-smarter-2015-9 Maps are fascinating. Did you know that early maps were not made for navigation at all, and a lot of modern maps are filled with mistakes and distortions that frustrate entire countries? Jay Foreman, co-host of the hit YouTube series Map Men (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfxy4_sBQdxy3A2lvl-y3qWTeJEbC_QCp) joins me to uncover the strange, surprising, and often controversial world of mapmaking — and why maps still shape how we see the world. Jay is author of the book This Way Up: When Maps Go Wrong (And Why It Matters) (https://amzn.to/49gSlrk). Everyone remembers a time when they wish they had been more courageous. They wish they had spoken up, took a risk, or made a bold move. But what separates courage from recklessness? Harvard Business School professor Ranjay Gulati, author of How to Be Bold: The Surprising Science of Everyday Courage (https://amzn.to/42Tmg52), explains how to tap into genuine courage when it matters most — and why bravery often looks different than you think. Finally, have you ever noticed that almost every zipper in your life works flawlessly? That’s no accident. One company dominates the global zipper market — and their story is a master class in precision, persistence, and quality. Listen as I reveal how this quiet manufacturing giant came to control nearly every zipper on Earth. https://ykkamericas.com/our-history/ PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS! AG1: Head to ⁠https://DrinkAG1.com/SYSK ⁠ to get a FREE Welcome Kit with an AG1 Flavor Sampler and a bottle of Vitamin D3 plus K2, when you first subscribe! INDEED: Get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ right now! QUINCE: Give and get timeless holiday staples that last this season with Quince. Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Quince.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns! ON POINT: We love the On Point podcast! Listen wherever you get your podcasts! ⁠⁠⁠⁠https://www.wbur.org/radio/programs/onpoint⁠⁠⁠⁠ SHOPIFY: Shopify is the commerce platform for millions of businesses around the world! To start selling today, sign up for your $1 per month trial at⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ https://Shopify.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  The award-winning American Airlines Advantage program rewards more than travel. It takes your whole life to new heights. Earn miles when you fly, as well as with thousands of your favorite brands. And then redeem those miles for flights, upgrades, and experiences worldwide. Advantage members also enjoy earlier boarding and free high-speed Wi-Fi in-flight. Join for free and start earning towards your next adventure at aa.com/spotify.

• 0:32Mike Carruthers?

  Today on Something You Should Know. Ever use a big fancy word to try to impress someone? I'll explain why that's probably a bad idea. Then, the fascinating world of maps. Many are inaccurate and some forget entire countries.

• 0:49Speaker 02

  Well, that's interesting because New Zealand goes missing from maps a lot. But then again, so do plenty of other places. So nations that go missing, as well as New Zealand, include Iceland, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, the Caribbean, and a lot of maps forget Antarctica completely.

• 1:05Mike Carruthers?

  Also, why zippers almost never fail. And why ordinary people sometimes do courageous things.

• 1:13Speaker 03

  Nelson Mandela talked about this. He said that, you know, I thought courage is the absence of fear. I've discovered courage is conquering fear. It's taking action in the face of fear. It's looking fear in the eye and still choosing to do something.

• 1:26Mike Carruthers?

  All this today on Something You Should Know.

• 1:31Mike Carruthers?

  Now here's something that might be worth a minute of your time. How would you like $1,000 to spend on shopping? Especially with the holidays coming. Well, the people behind Shopify have a shopping site called shop.com. And to celebrate the new shop.com, they're giving away $1 million in Shop Cash. But not to one person. 1,000 people will each win $1,000 in Shop Cash.

• 2:00Mike Carruthers?

  And shop.com is actually a really clever idea. It brings lots of different stores together in one place. So instead of bouncing around from website to website, you can search across stores, find what you're looking for, and track your orders, all in one place. Clothes, electronics, gifts, things for the house, all kinds of stuff. And whether you win or not, it's worth knowing, but with a thousand chances to win a thousand dollars, I'd certainly take a look. Enter to win the $1 million Shop Cash giveaway from now until November 1st. Just go to shop.com. There are so many ways to win.

• 2:44Mike Carruthers?

  That's shop.com. Shopping designed around you. No purchase necessary. Restrictions apply. Official rules available at shop.com.

• 2:54Speaker 04

  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.

• 3:09Mike Carruthers?

  It would seem that sometimes using big words can help you sound more intelligent. But does it? Well, that's what we're going to start with today on this episode of Something You Should Know. Hi, I'm Mike Carruthers and welcome. So just about everybody has tried to sound more intelligent by using a big word or two here and there. College kids do this all the time when writing papers because they think it makes them sound more intelligent and maybe they'll get a better grade. But actually, it turns out it makes them sound less intelligent. Different studies have looked at this and they all conclude pretty much that people value fluency, that is, the ability to read something easily and understand it, more than

• 3:54Mike Carruthers?

  they value a fancy vocabulary. Better fluency leads people to judge the author as smarter, more confident, and more credible. Now, it is true that having a big vocabulary is linked to higher intelligence, but the takeaway here seems to be that trying to sound more intelligent generally backfires. And that is something you should know.

• 4:21Mike Carruthers?

  One of the most useful inventions in human history, maybe the most useful, is the map. I mean, it's hard to imagine getting anywhere without one, but here's the interesting twist. The first maps weren't made to help you get from here to there. They had a completely different and far less practical purpose. And even today, many maps we rely on aren't nearly as accurate as you might think. The story of how maps evolved into these digital guides that we now carry in our pockets on our phones is full of surprises. Here to tell the story is Jay Foreman. He's co-host of the YouTube series Map Men and author of the book This Way Up: When

• 5:05Mike Carruthers?

  Maps Go Wrong and Why It Matters. Hi, Jay, welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 5:10Speaker 02

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 5:12Mike Carruthers?

  So, one thing I've always wondered about maps is you can look at a map from 150 years ago, pre-flight, before there were airplanes. How could they draw a map that was, it may not be perfectly accurate, but more or less had the right shape to it? How could they do that if they couldn't see from high up?

• 5:35Speaker 02

  Well, it's really spectacular. It depends how back, how far back in history you go, because if you go back 1,000 years to the first Ptolemy maps, they were the first maps that were attempting to be accurate, but without any of the kind of technology or data that we have now. And it was mostly just guesswork, just sort of walking around and doing the best straight lines possible. But it's when they started to use trigonometry, when they started to use instruments that can very, very accurately measure angles towards points a long distance away, that you can start to build up an accurate map. And it's important to remember that for the majority of civilization, accuracy was not the main priority in maps. Maps that circulated for many hundreds of years were primarily works of art, to go in the monarch's office just so they could see what they were king of, and they were decorative.

• 6:20Speaker 02

  And it's only really quite recently that maps have become a scientific tool. But what it goes to show is just what an amazing job these people did hundreds of years ago, how much harder it was and how we take it for granted.

• 6:31Mike Carruthers?

  So here's something I'm sure you would know. How old is the oldest map that's ever been found?

• 6:38Speaker 02

  The very first map that we know of was a map of Babylon, which is from about 9,000 B.C. And it took quite a long time for archaeologists to work out that it actually was a map they were looking at. Because I think "map" is quite a generous term for it. It was a sort of clay rectangle with some triangles scratched into it. But they worked out after a good, long stare that it was supposed to be a map of the world. And that is the earliest one that we know about.

• 7:03Mike Carruthers?

  Well, that's got to be interesting to see. I mean, when you think about the level of knowledge people had back then, when they draw a map of the world, it's theoretically what they think the world looks like.

• 7:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there's rather a lot missing from that map.

• 7:19Mike Carruthers?

  I would imagine.

• 7:20Speaker 02

  That's why it took them such a long time to work out that it was supposed to be a world map.

• 7:23Mike Carruthers?

  As you said a moment ago, you know, maps were not originally meant to be accurate. And they don't really have to be accurate in this sense. I've written, drawn out maps for people back in the old days before GPS, and they were far from accurate, but they did the job.

• 7:43Speaker 02

  Well, exactly. I mean, the only map, if you think about it, the only map that could possibly be truly accurate is a map that's of a scale of one to one and includes every single possible detail. And that's a very limited use. A map, by definition, has to distort the world in some way. If a map's job is to make something easy to understand and easy to read, then it has to make important decisions about what detail to leave out. And probably the best examples of these are metro maps, maps of train and bus systems around the world. So one of the most famous is the London Underground. It was designed in 1932 by an engineer called Harry Beck. And what he famously did was, he decided to completely do away with the concept of scale. And his map showed simply where the stations were, in what order,

• 8:27Speaker 02

  where the changes were between lines. And what you ended up with was something that looked more like a circuit diagram. As far as accuracy goes, it's absolutely dreadful. But as far as it being useful for knowing where to get your train, it was revolutionary. And that's just one extreme example. But really, every single map you look at does exactly the same thing. And it has to do some kind of distortion.

• 8:48Mike Carruthers?

  So who makes the maps? Are there big players? Have there been big players in the map making business? You know, when I went to school, I remember maps in the classroom that were, they were all made by Rand McNally.

• 9:01Speaker 02

  There were. So in the US, throughout most of the 20th century, there were three major companies that did the vast majority of maps in the US. And one of them was Rand McNally. The other one was General Drafting. The third one, I actually can't remember right now what the third one's called. But there was, not only did they have a, I suppose the word is triopoly, on the maps produced in the US, but there was a massive rivalry between them as well. And a fascinating story about how one was very nearly caught copying the other. And it caused all sorts of hilarious consequences. This is one of the things that we found when we were researching our book, is that there was a spectacular story from the 50s

• 9:40Speaker 02

  of Rand McNally inventing a town specifically for the purpose of avoiding somebody copying their map. But what happened was, somebody else saw this fake town that was called Aglo, built a store on the site where there was nothing there. And seeing on the map that there was this place apparently called Aglo, they decided to name it the Aglo General Store. And as a result, Aglo, which originally started out as a paper town, just a copyright trap, it became a real place. And therefore, the case was thrown out of court and couldn't be used. So yeah, there were major players and there was massive rivalry between them. And that's just in the US.

• 10:20Mike Carruthers?

  So where is Aglo?

• 10:22Speaker 02

  So Aglo, well, it's actually an absolute nothing. There's nothing there. But it's supposed to be in New York State, in the Catskill Mountains, very close to the border between Delaware County and one of the other counties that borders Delaware County.

• 10:36Mike Carruthers?

  My assumption is, and I think most people's assumption is, that maps today, if you see a map on TV, or you see a map in a book, or you see, that's, that's reporting itself to represent something, it's probably accurate. That maps today, that they've figured it out and all maps are accurate if they've been made in the last 30 years.

• 11:00Speaker 02

  That's only slightly true. It's very easy to think that, of course, a map should be accurate because these days it's made with satellites and it's made to be as accurate as possible, otherwise it doesn't do its job. But there's a couple of things to watch out for, and one of them is something I mentioned earlier, copyright traps, where map designers will deliberately, and almost all maps can do this, they will deliberately have a wrong detail, which causes no trouble to the map user, but big trouble to someone who tries to copy it to make their own map. And examples of this include making a squiggly road slightly more squiggly, or spelling the name of a town wrong, or, just like in the case of Agloe, making up a town that isn't there. So that's one thing to look out for, for accuracy. And the other one is good old fashioned human error, which is

• 11:44Speaker 02

  all over maps. And if you know where to look, you'll find them, especially on TV news networks. There are lots of great stories of maps on the news that show this is where Hong Kong is, and they've got a great big map of Brazil where they've labeled Hong Kong where Red and Yellow should be. It happens a lot. Well, the interesting thing is that map mistakes, they often do very, very well online and on social media. There's a whole phenomenon, there's a Reddit thread called "Maps Without New Zealand", which is people across the world collecting every time they see an example of a world map where New Zealand is strangely missing. And it happens rather a lot. And no matter where you post a map, if you post a map that's wrong, if it contains anything such as a spelling mistake, or a city in the wrong place, people love to get involved and to respond and to, you know, to get angry about it being in the wrong

• 12:29Speaker 02

  place. And you could even argue there might be some news networks that potentially getting their maps wrong on purpose in order to generate clicks. It's not impossible.

• 12:38Mike Carruthers?

  But why New Zealand? Why are there so many maps of not New Zealand?

• 12:44Speaker 02

  Well, that's interesting, because New Zealand goes missing from maps a lot. But then again, so do plenty of other places. So nations that go missing as well as New Zealand all the time include Iceland, Sri Lanka, the Philippines, the Caribbean, and a lot of maps forget Antarctica completely. I think the reason that we hear so much about New Zealand going missing, and I think the reason that there's a Reddit thread with far more views dedicated to maps without New Zealand than maps without Novaya Zemlya. Is because when New Zealand goes missing, it's the funniest. Partly because it's quite large and it's a comparatively easy game of spot the difference when it's not there, partly because they speak English and partly because they've made it their own. The government website has it.

• 13:27Speaker 02

  They've also, New Zealand Tourism produced this series of genuinely funny videos all about the great conspiracy to remove New Zealand. So that's why we see so much about it. And I think the reason it happens so much in the first place is because it's in the bottom corner. So it's very easy to accidentally crop and forget it's there.

• 13:44Mike Carruthers?

  So maps represent what's there, but do maps, when people see them, ever inspire change in the landscape? And in other words, for example, the border between Connecticut and Massachusetts, there's this little notch where Massachusetts dips down into Connecticut or it's the other way around. But was that the result of somebody seeing the map and going, hey, we need to change that or something?

• 14:14Speaker 02

  The answer is absolutely yes. This sort of thing happens all the time and it specifically happens in North America. There was a famous case where after the Treaty of Paris, they were trying to draw the border between what would eventually become the US and Canada. And what they decided to do was, let's just stick to the 49th parallel. And it's supposed to continue from east to west in a unwavering, dead straight line. But of course, what happened was, most of that continent wasn't really known to the mapmakers at that time. There was rather a lot of guesswork going on. So they drew the line first and the map became the border between the two before the actual world itself had the border imposed onto it. And as a result, they found all sorts of things that if they'd had an accurate map

• 14:59Speaker 02

  in the first place, or if they'd gone out to look in the first place, they never would have chosen a dead straight line on the 49th parallel. So there are two big examples. One of them is Point Roberts, which is in, was supposed to be in British Columbia in Canada, but it's actually in the US. It's a peninsula that behaves like an island because you can only get there from the US by boat or by driving through Canada and having your passport checked twice. So all the American citizens that live in Point Roberts, if they want to go to their nearest high school, they have to drive through Canada and back again, effectively using their passport four times a day. And there's another one as well. There's the Angle Inlet, which is the same thing, but closer to the East Coast. And that was an example where the treaty said the border

• 15:44Speaker 02

  should be at the northwest corner of the Lake of the Woods. The trouble was, nobody at the time knew exactly where or what shape the Lake of the Woods was. And so when they went to actually survey the land with this treaty in their hand, they had no option but to draw this line in an absurd, straight line down, cutting off part of the US when it should actually, by all reasonable logic, it should be in Canada. But to this day, it's a part of the US that you can only access either by boat or by traveling through two countries.

• 16:14Mike Carruthers?

  We're discussing things you never knew about maps. And my guest is Jay Forman, author of This Way Up: When Maps Go Wrong and Why It Matters.

• 16:26Speaker 00

  The award-winning American Airlines Advantage Program rewards more than travel. It takes your whole life to new heights. Earn miles when you fly, as well as with thousands of your favorite brands, and then redeem those miles for flights, upgrades, and experiences worldwide. Advantage members also enjoy earlier boarding and free high-speed Wi-Fi in-flight. Join for free and start earning towards your next adventure at aa.com/spotify.

• 16:56Speaker 05

  Pink Pantheress here. Coach and Spotify are teaming up to bring music and style together, and they want you to be part of it. Grab your friends and head to the Tabby Tour, hitting cities around the country with live performances from special artists, exclusive experiences, and personalized products. And discover custom playlists on Spotify, booked just for you based on who you are and how you listen. Live your story with Coach. Learn more at coach.com.

• 17:23Mike Carruthers?

  So Jay, you know, people used to have all kinds of maps in their glove compartment, but now everybody's got GPS on their phone. And, you know, the map's pretty accurate. It seems to get you from here to there. And then services like Waze and Google Maps, I mean, they give you actual driving directions. Seems like a pretty good map.

• 17:45Speaker 02

  But on the other hand, we're losing a vital skill. There were some studies done that showed that the rise of GPS is likely contributing to an epidemic in Alzheimer's, and that's because using a good old fashioned paper map, in fact, it doesn't even have to be a paper map, using a map, it can even be on your smartphone, but where the map doesn't revolve around you, where you have to look at it and work out where you are. That skill is something that is very good for the hippocampus. There was a study done, and they worked out that of 400 different occupations, the occupation that had by far the biggest hippocampus was taxi drivers because of the regular exercise they were doing in memorizing the streets

• 18:26Speaker 02

  and knowing their way around London without having to depend on GPS. So it's something that we're missing out on. There's another study we found out about. UCL did another study in 2014 where they got a bunch of students to walk around Soho, this neighborhood in central London. Half of them were using their sat navs, they were using GPS on their phone, and half of them were using paper maps. And they were all walking around wearing this special equipment on their head that monitored how much their hippocampus was being used. And it turns out that those that were using maps the old fashioned way, their hippocampuses were being used rather a lot, and it was firing away during this experiment. And those that were just staring down at the blinking blue dots on their phone,

• 19:08Speaker 02

  it was barely being used at all. So it's a rather worrying trend, but not a huge amount we can necessarily do about it because they become so indispensable using GPS, to the point that there's now plenty of people who know their way around their city perfectly well. And yet even they use GPS because it now has information that you couldn't hope to know yourself, such as where the traffic jams are, or which roads might be closed.

• 19:32Mike Carruthers?

  You know, I think everybody has mixed emotions about ways and other navigation systems that send you on different routes than you would normally take. And you're so tempted to say, yeah, I know a better way. And yet so often, when you do that, you get stuck in traffic. And you wonder like, you wonder whether their way is the right way, or the best way, or not.

• 19:58Speaker 02

  When they send you on these routes, especially if you use Waze, which is the it's the GPS that specializes in squiggly little shortcuts to avoid even the slightest traffic jam. And I sometimes wonder, they might be experimenting on you and they're sending each driver a slightly different way so that they can get data about which way was quicker. And if that were true, that would explain why several times it said, turn this way, take the little squiggly road to the left, and I've ignored it and got there much faster than it said I would.

• 20:25Mike Carruthers?

  Except when you don't. Except when you say, you know what?

• 20:28Speaker 02

  Except when you don't. There are, there are plenty of stories of people who are relying too much on their GPS and they end up in some absurd situations and some dangerous situations. My favorite story is, there was a couple on holiday in Italy. They wanted to get to the luxurious island of Capri, but they drove for hundreds of miles and ended up in the city of Carpi, which is very similar spelling, but completely the wrong side of the country. And there were some other people who tried to get to what turned out to be an island in Australia and their car was instructed to drive across a lake, which they tried to do. There was a woman who drove onto train tracks because the sat nav told her to. And actually, I think my favorite one of all time, there was a Belgian woman who was

• 21:13Speaker 02

  supposed to be driving less than an hour away from her house to Brussels Railway Station to pick up her grandson. And she drove for more than two days, all the way from Belgium to Croatia, across five countries. And she only realized something was wrong when the sat nav said, you have reached your destination.

• 21:32Mike Carruthers?

  Have there been any, like, because we think of them as being so accurate, have there been anything, anything that anyone's found lately, like in the last 50 years that said, wait a minute, that's actually not there, or that's not the way that goes?

• 21:49Speaker 02

  The most recent one that comes to mind is a case in 2012 where Google Maps, which you know, we usually think of it as the best map that humanity has ever produced and very accurate and updates itself all the time. An entire island that wasn't there, which dates all the way back to Captain Cook. So the story is there is an island, a so-called island that isn't there called Sandy Island, which Captain Cook thought he'd spotted. To this day, we don't know why he thought there was an island there. It could be that he'd spotted a different island and didn't know where he was. Or it might have been a Fattamorgana, it might have been a speck of dust in his eye. We don't know, but the point is, maps were produced for hundreds of years that said, there is an island here despite nobody ever checking. And the incredible thing is that phantom island lasted right up until the age of satellites

• 22:34Speaker 02

  because Google Maps, despite most people thinking that you take lots of satellite images, you take photos of the world and then use that to draw the maps. It's actually the other way around. It's a lot quicker and cheaper and more accurate to take the map data that already exists and then paste your photos on top. And so because they did that, in the part of the Indian Ocean where they expected Sandy Island to be, there's a great big, well, up until 2012 when they got rid of it, there was a great big black smudge because that was where they told their computers, don't use plain blue for ocean, use actual satellite photo. And so where the island should be is an actual satellite photo of the ocean, which in real life is a very, very dark blue that looks like a black smudge.

• 23:19Speaker 02

  So yeah, this is a map era that lasted right up until 2012.

• 23:23Mike Carruthers?

  You would think that there isn't a lot of controversy when it comes to maps, but but maybe there is because, you know, and maybe there are countries that aren't particularly happy with the way their country is portrayed on the map or on the globe. Is there any of that?

• 23:39Speaker 02

  We're always keeping an eye on what's in the news with maps at the moment. Any geography-related news story is interesting to us. And there was one that came up just less than a month ago where the African Union, which is a union of African countries, has put out a statement that they wish for most world maps to be changed because most world maps are using an old-fashioned projection method. The Mercator projection, which famously is accurate for shape but not very accurate for scale, takes the... So the problem is taking a round Earth and making a flat map of it is impossible to do without some kind of distortion. You have to either stretch bits or squash bits or slice bits.

• 24:20Speaker 02

  And the most popular method for doing it is the so-called Mercator projection, which sort of imagines that the globe is a balloon inside a tube. You blow up the balloon inside the tube, and then when you deflate it, the ink has left behind where the countries are. And the consequence of this is it makes all the regions near the poles, such as Greenland, enormous, and that's at the expense of all the regions close to the equator, which look much smaller than they are. So on the most commonly seen flat map of the world, Greenland is about the same size as all of Africa. And it also makes most of Northern Europe look bigger than it really is. It stretches Scotland, it stretches Norway to be enormous, it makes Canada twice the size it really is.

• 25:02Speaker 02

  And the African Union pointed out that this is an unhelpfully sort of colonialist way of looking at the world. And when you have a map on a classroom wall, you've got to ask yourself, what's the job of that map? Is it so that people can navigate the world using minds? Does it have to be an accurate shape? Or is it perhaps more accurate to learn something like, Africa is huge? So that's why they're pushing for the Mercator map, the Mercator projection. To be retired after hundreds of years of imposing itself on the world and for it to be swapped with something that better acknowledges that any flat map of the round earth is a distortion and it shouldn't always be distorted at the expense of Africa, which in real life is massive.

• 25:47Mike Carruthers?

  Well, no wonder you have your own show on YouTube. You know, I would have thought maps, I mean, how interesting can that be, but clearly it is. I've been talking with Jay Forman, co-host of Map Man on YouTube and author of the book, This Way Up: When Maps Go Wrong and Why It Matters. There's a link to that book at Amazon in the show notes. Jay, thank you for coming on. Thank you so much. Thanks for having me on.

• 26:16Speaker 00

  The award-winning American Airlines Advantage Program rewards more than travel. It takes your whole life to new heights. Earn miles when you fly, as well as with thousands of your favorite brands, and then redeem those miles for flights, upgrades, and experiences worldwide. Advantage members also enjoy earlier boarding and free high-speed Wi-Fi in-flight. Join for free and start earning towards your next adventure at aa.com/spotify.

• 26:46Speaker 05

  Pink Pantheress here. Coach and Spotify are teaming up to bring music and style together, and they want you to be part of it. Grab your friends and head to the Tabby Tour, hitting cities around the country with live performances from special artists, exclusive experiences, and personalized products. And discover custom playlists on Spotify, booked just for you, based on who you are and how you listen. Live your story with Coach. Learn more at coach.com.

• 27:16Mike Carruthers?

  We tend to admire people who are bold, the ones who take chances, stand up for what they believe, or do things that most of us would never dare do. But what gives them that courage? Are they born that way, or have they learned to face their fears differently? My guest, Ranjay Gulati, says there's real science behind everyday courage, and anyone can develop it. He is a professor at Harvard Business School and author of "How to Be Bold: The Surprising Science of Everyday Courage." Hey Ranjay, welcome to Something You Should Know.

• 27:53Speaker 03

  Thank you, Mike. It's a pleasure to be here with you today.

• 27:56Mike Carruthers?

  So when someone is described as courageous or bold, another word that's often used is fearless. Are courageous and bold people fearless? Is that what courage is?

• 28:10Speaker 03

  Courage is not the absence of fear, which is the way Hollywood and other fictional accounts portrayed. Courage is taking action in the face of fear. Most of us are not fearless. The fearless are far and few between. Most of us experience fear. Courage is being able to take action in the face of fear.

• 28:32Mike Carruthers?

  So you often hear people say, "Look what he's doing. I could never do that." Like skydiving or climbing up a mountain. "I could never do that." Either because there's something I have that gets in the way, or there's something he doesn't have that allows him to do that.

• 28:54Speaker 03

  So you know, it's a great observation. And actually, one of the starting points for cowardice or lack of courage is this self-talk. We all have a narrative that we tell ourselves about ourselves. "This is who I am. This is what I'm capable of doing. This is what I'm not capable of doing." And this inner voice can be a powerful enabler. It can also be a powerful disabler. I'll just give you an example of this. So when I was a teenager, you know, my mother was a successful fashion designer. She was doing very well. She bought a piece of land. A real estate developer was desperately trying to get this land from her. And one day, he sends somebody to speak to her. I'm a teenager.

• 29:38Speaker 03

  And he wants to come in for five minutes. My mother agrees to meet him. I bring him in. She's in the living room. He sits down across from her. And he says, "Ma'am, I need to buy your land." And she says, "Well, I'm really sorry. I've told you before, I don't want to sell it. I want to keep it for myself." He takes out a blank check and a piece of paper, says, ma'am, please, you write the number. She says, it doesn't matter. I don't need the money. I just don't wanna sell my land. I'm gonna build a farmhouse over there. He then gets a little more belligerent and says, ma'am, I can't leave without your signature. And he's a big burly guy, and my mother is five foot one. And my mother says, I'm sorry, not gonna happen. So he then, he's wearing a blazer, leans back and shows a gun.

• 30:21Speaker 03

  Now, I'm at the door, I see it, I'm panicked, I'm thinking, what should I do? What should I do? Should I not? Should I call the guard at the gate? Should I jump him? Should I wait for him? Is he bluffing? My mother, without hesitation, stands up, walks across the room, and slaps him across the face. He doesn't even see it coming.

• 30:38Mike Carruthers?

  Wow.

• 30:39Speaker 03

  She says, how dare you come to my house and try to scare me and bully me into giving you my land and you're scaring me with a gun? Get out of my house! Afterwards, I told her, I said, Mom, didn't you see he had a gun? She said, yes. I said, that was scary. Why didn't, didn't you think you could shoot us? She said, you know what? I was scared. But being scared doesn't mean you do nothing. And it dawned on me that, you know, fear can paralyze us. We have our own little self, and fear is a primal human emotion, hardwired in the primitive brain. So most of us are paralyzed by fear. We don't wanna, and we have this self-talk in our head, I can't do this, this is not me.

• 31:23Speaker 03

  And you have to change your self-talk. In my mother's mind, you know, she had worked incredibly hard, overcoming credible obstacles to reach where she had, from being a laid-off schoolteacher, anthropologist, turned businesswoman, fashion designer in France. You know, she wasn't gonna let somebody bully her now. So how do we change that talk in our head is the starting point in this journey. It's not the end point.

• 31:50Mike Carruthers?

  Well, wait a minute, though. I admire that your mother had such courage, but there were some other options that were a little less scary, like trying to stall him, or let me talk to my lawyer, or let me set up a meeting with, you know, my people, or, I mean, she could have de-escalated the situation. She chose to do what she did, but...

• 32:11Speaker 03

  There was, I skipped that part. I skipped the conciliatory conversation to say, I don't want to. This is not gonna happen. He was adamant, I am taking your signature today. I will not leave this room without your signing this paper.

• 32:26Mike Carruthers?

  Still, though, slapping him was, you know, as the title of your book suggests, was a very bold move to make a statement. But there were perhaps other options. But here's the thing, when I hear that story and when most people hear that story, as I just said, I admire her for doing that. But, and probably because I don't think I would have ever done that. And then I think, well, why? What, I mean, because he's not gonna shoot her. I mean, he wasn't gonna, he wasn't gonna shoot.

• 32:59Speaker 03

  You know, I asked her, I asked afterwards, well, you know, the thing is, Mike, you have to understand the cultural context of India in the seventies, a bit lawless, you know, where this is a thug, he's a fixer sent by a real estate guy. This is a pretty lawless, thuggy system where the guy is pulling out and showing a gun. And he said, I'm gonna get your signature today, whether you want to or not. And she had to do something, you know? I mean, I was home as a son. My sister was at home and the guard was outside. And he knew he had the upper hand. So we can debate the situation and say she could be, I've skipped a lot of detail.

• 33:42Speaker 03

  She tried very hard to conciliate with the guy and he said, I am taking that signature of yours today. And he got belligerent from being very polite and conciliatory to belligerent. And, you know, he was a six feet, three big guy. And I think the point to take is, you know, we can debate the story and the merits of the story. I think the point I wanna take from this is that, you know, we all experience fear in uncertain situations. And some of us, most of us will freeze up. And sometimes you have to do something drastic.

• 34:14Mike Carruthers?

  And why do we freeze up? My sense is because we're afraid of what might happen next.

• 34:22Speaker 03

  To understand that, you have to understand that where does fear originate? Fear is a primal, survival, human emotion. It's hardwired in the brain, in the amygdala, in the primitive brain. And it originates from what is called uncertainty.

• 34:40Speaker 03

  What is uncertainty? Uncertainty is not risk. Uncertainty is where we don't know. Risk is where you can look at the distribution of outcomes, put probabilities on them. You know, say 10% chance of this, 30% chance of that. Kind of like, you know, laid out. The entire field of finance is based on risk, risk management, you know, risk adjudication, all that stuff. Uncertainty is where you don't know. You know, one of the worst words you can use to describe somebody is coward. Well, cowardice is a normal response. Running away. Survival. You know, we, yeah. If you look at our ancestors, Mike, most of our ancestors were not brave. The ones who were brave didn't make it.

• 35:24Speaker 03

  The ones who made it were the ones who ran and hid when there was danger. Sometimes. And, yeah, but again, human progress is because a few of them chose to face into danger. The Wright brothers, when they invented the airplane, guess who flew in the plane? They did. That was risky and uncertain, right? When you have Alexander Fleming injecting himself with penicillin to see if it works. So you have all these people who really put themselves out there in the face of uncertainty. So the puzzle then, the puzzle, the question really is,

• 36:05Speaker 03

  what is it that allows ordinary people to take bold action? And into that question is rolled another question. Can we learn to become bold or are we simply just born bold? To which you say what? To which I say, what I looked at all these courageous people and I interviewed them, and there was several hundred of them. Most of them became courageous. They had taught themselves to be courageous. And then I discovered that they actually had strategies to deal with fear. They tamed the fear, they engaged with the fear, they took action in spite of the fear. I'll give you an example. Brandon Say.

• 36:47Speaker 03

  Brandon Say was a cashier at a dance hall in California. And a gunman shows up. He's already shot up another dance hall a few miles away. And he shows up with an AK-47, I think it was.

• 37:03Speaker 03

  And Brandon's fur, he's a pacifist, slightly built fellow. And he's behind the door at the cashier window. His first reaction is to duck under the table and hide. Maybe the guy won't see me and he'll just go into the dance hall and do whatever he has to do. And then he asks himself, you know, like, what am I doing? This is my grandmother's dance hall. My mother worked here her whole life till she passed away. This has been our family's kind of, I'm the custodian of this place. And by the way, the people who are dancing inside are all the people I've known since I was a kid. It was a ballroom dance place for adults, seniors.

• 37:44Speaker 03

  And he gets himself up, opens the door, comes out and confronts the gunman. And is able to, after a fight where the gunman punches this guy in the face multiple times, he's able to grab the gun away from him. This is a guy who's never really ever fought with anybody ever. So I had to ask him, like, how did you resource yourself? And what did you do to compel yourself to do this? I talked to Marines. How do they compel themselves to put themselves in harm's way? I talked to an astronaut who was a Top Gun pilot before. Like, what compelled him to do what he does? I talked to a Ukrainian mergers and acquisitions lawyer,

• 38:26Speaker 03

  who is now a frontline commando in their, you know, undercover operations. Like, why is he doing what he's doing? And you discover that these people have found deliberate strategies that allow themselves to take on fear and take action.

• 38:47Mike Carruthers?

  But doesn't there have to be some sort of live to fight another day? That there are plenty of fearless people who are dead because they did something fearless and it didn't work out.

• 39:00Speaker 03

  First of all, I want to be very clear. You said fearless. I didn't say fearless. These are fearful people. Fearless, you're right, there are a few handful of people out there who are fearless. These are people taking action in the face of fear. But you make an important point. There's a distinction between, Aristotle made this distinction, between courage and reckless. So courageous doesn't mean reckless, first of all. You know, you're taking action within means and within limits. The second piece of the puzzle is, you know, courage doesn't always lead to good outcomes for people.

• 39:36Speaker 03

  Right? That's what courage is. You're taking action in spite of fear. One of my former MBA students was Frances Haugen, who became the whistleblower at Facebook. And she felt morally compelled to do what she did. She lost her job and her career. So sometimes it doesn't have a good outcome. So it's not like courage is, that's convenient courage. I'll do something, but as long as the outcome is good, I'm courageous. No. And you're right that the media and all of us tend to portray examples of people where courage has a good ending. You know, the hero, the heroine wins. It doesn't always happen that way. But that's what courage is, that you're willing to take action, not reckless action.

• 40:20Speaker 03

  But with the full understanding that this is uncertain and it may or may not end in a good way, but you feel compelled to do something.

• 40:27Mike Carruthers?

  But do you think there are some people, though, that really are just that way? I mean, it seems like there are people who just... It's almost as if they don't care. It's not like, I'm not going to sit here and weigh the pros and cons. I'm just going to take action. And that's like part of who they are.

• 40:50Speaker 03

  Absolutely. There are some people who are wired that way. But what can we, what can the rest of us learn from them? I mean, the point I want to make is that there are ordinary people who may not be wired that way, who still choose to act boldly. Think about the lion in Wizard of Oz. Right? He finally gets to the wizard and says, "Give me courage. Give me courage." And the wizard says, "But you already have courage." He said, "No, but I'm scared. I'm scared all the time." He said, "But you still chose to take action even though you were scared. You are courageous."

• 41:26Speaker 03

  And I think what we need to understand is, how can ordinary people who may not have this congenital magical quality of fearlessness can resource themselves to act with courage? Meaning, taking action. Nelson Mandela talked about this too. He said that, you know, I thought courage is the absence of fear. I've discovered courage is conquering fear. It's taking action in the face of fear. It's looking fear in the eye and still choosing to do something.

• 41:56Mike Carruthers?

  When you think about it, or when I think about it, there seems to be a connection between confidence and courage. Yes?

• 42:05Speaker 03

  Actually, there's a really interesting body of research on self-efficacy by a Stanford psychologist, Albert Bandura. And he said that, you know, there are two aspects to confidence. One is domain-specific efficacy. I'm the master of my craft. I know my job. I know my skills. You know, Captain Salenberger has to fly a United Airlines flight where the engines of both fail at takeoff from LaGuardia, and he has to land the plane in the Hudson River. He's a 40-year seasoned veteran pilot. He's, you know, he knows what needs to be done. That's called domain-specific efficacy. But there's a second kind of efficacy, which is the generalized can-do efficacy. I got it. I can do it.

• 42:50Speaker 03

  So when Katie Couric asked Captain Salenberger, like, listen, what did he need to do? Did he know what he needed? He said, I knew what I needed to do, but I'd never done it before. So Katie Couric said, but there's a big if. You know, you hadn't done it before. And he looks her in the eye and says, I knew I could do it. I knew I could do it. So where do you find that? So similarly, I have a set of kind of other practices that individuals can do. I then pivot in near the end of the book into collective courage. How do you bake courage into organizations, into teams, into collectives? How do sports athletes, coaches of sports teams, how do they build a winning mindset, a bold mindset into their team?

• 43:33Speaker 03

  Whether you're a football team, or a soccer team, or a basketball team. And if you look at some of the coach memoirs, they all talk about this, this winning spirit.

• 43:44Mike Carruthers?

  When people are in that moment where they have to be courageous and they're feeling the fear, what are they afraid of? Afraid of what? Is it, what's gonna happen? Is, how, what will people think? Or what is the fear that paralyzes people?

• 44:02Speaker 03

  You know, first of all, you know that fear is a primal human emotion that is hardwired. It's a survival emotion. There was actually a book not long ago called, I think, The Benefits of Fear. That you need fear. Listen to your fear. It's telling you something. So don't neglect fear. Fear is telling you there's danger around you somewhere. But usually, the fear we have is of downside risk. It's what, there's a Nobel Prize around this idea of loss avoidance, that we experience the pain of losing more than the pleasure of winning. The pain of losing is greater than the pleasure of winning.

• 44:45Speaker 03

  So we are loss avoiders. In fact, in golf, the pain of getting a bogey is greater than the pleasure from getting a birdie. Right? In tennis, the pain of a double fault is greater than the pleasure of, you know, winning the point. And so, you know, that's why in tennis, you know, all these coaches, what do they teach their players? Second serve should not be just some lame serve. It better be a damn good serve, too. That is a huge bottleneck for these people. What happens to golfers? They have a bad hole and then they become all nervous and cautious about having another bad hole.

• 45:27Speaker 03

  In fact, Scottie Scheffler, you know, the number one golf player these days, in an interview not long ago, was asked like, what changed his game? Like, this guy is like, just cranked it up. And he said it was a round of golf that he played with Tiger Woods at the Masters in 2022. And I think it was the 12th hole or something, it's a par three hole, and Tiger hit two balls into the water hazard and he got a 10 on a par three. And immediately, he was out of contention in the tournament. And so Scotty's watching this quietly because he's paired up with Tiger. And what he watches is Tiger comes back and birdies the next five holes, one after the other.

• 46:11Speaker 03

  He's completely tuned out of that. But you know, loss avoidance becomes, and by the way, in sports psychology, they say that when we encounter fear, it also creates muscular over tightening. Our muscles tighten up. And that wrecks the game. That makes it even worse. So I think it's important to understand the emotion of fear, as you pointed out, and also recognize that fear is about the downside risk. What is the worst thing that can happen to me? And but its origination point is uncertainty. Because in uncertainty, you don't know what's going to happen. So you can only think of the worst case scenario.

• 46:54Speaker 03

  And you don't see that you only see the downside.

• 46:58Mike Carruthers?

  Well, you know, there's nothing like a rousing conversation about being bold and facing fear that'll give yourself some courage in whatever scary thing you have to face next. I've been speaking with Ranjai Gulati. He is a professor at Harvard Business School and author of the book, How to Be Bold: The Surprising Science of Everyday Courage. There's a link to that book in the show notes, and I appreciate you talking about this today, Ranjai.

• 47:26Mike Carruthers?

  If you grab almost any zipper on your jacket or backpack or jeans, there's a good chance it's stamped with the letters YKK. And that's a good thing. YKK are the initials for a Japanese company that roughly translates to Yoshida Manufacturing Corporation. The company was founded in 1934, and today, YKK is estimated to make around half of all the zippers in the world, billions every year, and has earned an unmatched reputation for consistency and reliability. Designers and manufacturers trust YKK because their zippers almost never jam, split, or corrode.

• 48:10Mike Carruthers?

  The company now produces other fasteners and snaps and architectural products, but zippers remain its core business. And YKK zippers are so ubiquitous that it would be hard to find a household anywhere on the planet that doesn't have at least one YKK zipper somewhere inside. And that is something you should know. As a listener of Something You Should Know, I trust that you find value in listening to this podcast, and I'm sure you know other people that would also find value in it. So I hope you'll share it with them, ask them to give a listen. Just use the share button on the player you've got and it makes it real easy. I'm Mike Herbrothers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.

• 48:56Speaker 05

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• 49:24Speaker 06

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