Are we in the Middle of a Rudeness Epidemic?

public transportation, so she made me take the bus. It was the super rainy day and gray, but we got on and we had this really long bus ride, so we watched a lot of people get on and off and here's what's amazing to me. Every single person who got on the bus thanked the bus driver as they got off. It like it was really amazing and so civil.

And that day was so gray and everyone could have been miserable, but the fact that everyone, like this whole group of people one by one, where each telling the bus driver thank you for doing his job, I don't know, it just made me so happy and it made me want to thank the bus driver too. But it also made me wonder, like, why isn't every other place in the US like this? Why isn't this just the expected

behavior across the US? And of course, as you and I both know, as full as the world is of good people were also played with horrible internet commenters and surly reality show judges and politicians who are anything but decent, and it makes you wonder is the world getting ruder? Do scientists really believe that rudeness spreads like an affection? And what can we do to change this tide? And that's what we're talking about today. Let's dive in a

their podcast. Listeners, Welcome to Part Time Genius. I'm Will Pearson and as always I'm joined by my good friend man guest Ticketer and sitting on the soundproof booth sporting his what's it say? I'm Bart Simpson. Who the heck are you? T? Shirt? That's our pal and producer Christen McNeil.

That is one rude T shirt. You know, when when The Simpsons first came out on the air and that shirt came out in fifth grade, kids in my school either had to turn their shirts around or put duct tape over the word heck and uh, and then the shirts got banned. Yeah, I remember parents thinking like these kids today and shaking their heads but you know, actually that's always been the case. Kids have always been rude,

and parents have always complained about it. And in fact, we have the perfect person to chat with about that and all things rude, the author of a new book. F you very much understanding the culture of rudeness and what we can do about it, Danny Wallace. Welcome to Part Time Genius. Thank you very much, pleased to be here. So, Danny, one of the most amazing things to me about the book, and it is truly, truly wonderful. I'm just amazed that it was inspired by a hot dog. Would you mind

telling us a little bit about that story? Of course? Um, yes, it was. It was inspired by by hot dog. I like hot dogs. There's no crime in that, um, and there was. There was one day where I really fancied the hot dog, and my son wanted a hot dog as well, and we found a place that sold hot dogs advertised, you know, the hot dogs that it was selling. So so really this should have been very, very easy, and this is as long as the story should ever

have been. But I went inside to get the hot dog. Again, I've done it before. I know what I'm doing. Um, I go in and I asked for the hot dog. But I don't know if you've ever walked in, it's too I don't know, well anywhere really where it just feels like the person behind the counter has already taken against you somehow, And that's really how it felt. There was something in the air, some sort of vibe, and she made me pay up front, which I thought was unusual.

But you know, it wasn't just like a fast food thing. It was a proper kind of little diner style restaurant down by the seaside um. But you know, I did everything that was required of me, and then I was standing waiting for it, and she made us kind of stand outside and kind of fifteen minutes passed, and that seemed like the right amount of time to pass for what should be a very quick meal to make for me to go in and ask where it was. She kept going, you don't understand how it works, and I

kept going, well, I do understand how it works. You know, I had a hotdog, and you give me the hot dog, and she keeps she keeps going, they're cooked to order. And I was like, well, I ordered one and you haven't cooked it. You know, I've been to restaurance before that, that's how every restaurant works. And at one point she ended up saying something very insulting, or at least it sounded insulting. She she said, you're probably the sort of

people who'd queue up for forty minutes for fish and chips. Wow, I I still be done. If they don't know what that means. It struck to the very core of me um and maybe question who I would I use forty minutes official chips? I don't know. I don't know worry

em anymore. The reason I realized that I was kind of going a bit mad with this and I was obsessing over it because for a couple of days, like when someone's been truly rude to you and they've broken those rules, it's very confusing you and up quite bewildered. It's why people can't often come up with something witty

to say in the moment. And because they disrespected you or made you feel kind of publicly disrespected, you are trying to claw back some of that respect somehow, And so it kept going over and over in my head, and you know, I'll be driving around and they'd be like a lull in the conversation between me and my wife and me and my son, and then out of nowhere, I would just immediately go that woman was unbelievable, and

just start talking about her again. And the next night I drove past the diner and it was completely dark and it was empty, and I found myself, as a grown man, flipping off a diner and with no one in it. There was nothing to be gained by doing it, apart from my own sort of sanity. And that's when I realized, you know, these these rude things that happened to us, they they send us temporarily insane, I think,

and I wanted to find out why. I mean, I think one of the amazing things about it is that you actually write that rudeness is airborne and the passes from person to person like a yarn. And I'd love to hear you talk a little bit more about that. Yeah, well, science has shown that that really rudeness does spread. It is kind of contagious, and it kind of spreads throughout an office or a school or a workplace or wherever um in much the same way as the common cold.

So those people who were sitting there, shiny eyed, gleeful, watching, you know, an altercation between a hot dog less man and the keeper of the hot dogs. When they saw people being rude to each other without realizing it, they will now sort of be infected. It will be much easier for them to be rude later on in their day. And when someone's being directly rude to you, and again those unwritten rules kind of have been broken. Um. If they've been rude to you, you're going to feel much

worse in yourself. It can affect um how you were lacks after work. You won't be able to switch off in quite the same way you might be snapp here with your partner. Your downtime won't be as as downtimey as you as you'd like it. Your rest period won't be as RESTful as you'd like it. If you snap at your partner, they now being infected and they'll then take that rudeness elsewhere. Um. But anyone who even just

witnesses the rudeness will become primed for more rudeness. So, for example, if you've seen someone you know in the line for coffee this morning, be rude to the barista even though it had nothing to do with you. Later on in the day, because you've experienced that moment, and it may have dredged up some kind of you memories of rudeness for you, and feelings of being slightly on edge. You're much more likely to now see rudeness where none

was intended. So you might get an email which is perfectly neutral in tone, and yet you will be more likely to read sarcasm into it or maybe passive aggression. Um, and that person is completely oblivious. They just they put a smiley there just to be nice. But you're like, what is this smiley really me? So it kind of

puts us all on edge even just seeing it. So I was recently on a train and I paid extra to be on a quiet car, and this person came in with their cell phone and just chatted the whole time. And I just could not ignore the person, and uh, personally because they were bragging about themselves continuously, but also just because I couldn't avoid listening in. And you actually have a section about half of ARDSCA. Can you talk

a little bit about cell phones and why they're so annoying? Yeah, of course, Well, on one level, when we got onto a train and we're in public space, UM, certainly I understand, Uh, you know, my part, my rules. If I got a table, I'm not going to spread my stuff all over the table. I understand I've got a little bit of the table. I'm not gonna, you know, shove my legs out right in front of me, because I understand that person's got

their space. We all have these little instinctive moments of respect that we pay to one another so that we can all, you know, get along. And when someone stands up and starts chatting away loudly on their phone and knows that everyone else must be able to hear it, they're sort of removing themselves from the group that they're saying, you're a group. You you're all the group, but I'm special. I'm having my phone call and they have their phone call.

And why it's so annoying for other people. If you have, you know, two old ladies sitting, you know, in the row behind you and they're just chatting away and laughing, it's sort of fine because they're they're chatting and you can hear the whole conversation. It might be annoying, but it's not necessarily rude. Why someone chatting on their phone is impossible to ignore? Um and is is rude is because you can only hear that half of the conversation

that you're talking about behalf a log um. And the human brain, no matter what you're trying to do, it's always hungry for a story. It's always trying to solve, you know, problems, it's trying to work stuff out. So even if you're trying your best to ignore this person having their chat, your brain is trying to fill in the blanks. And and there's also the kind of the staccato nature of a conversation. You're trying to get into your flow, your rhythm wherever you do. When you're driving

and someone cuts you up, they disturb your flow. If you're on a train and you're reading a book and you have to read the same sentence nineteen times because of the person having the chat, your flow has been interrupted. And we feel that on some level that is always quite a rude thing. But the random nature of replies on a one sided conversation, because you don't know how

long the other guy is gonna talk for. You know, you might do a one word answer, you might you might you talk for ten minutes and you'll just here a man going hard the whole time. So because it's completely unpredictable, it's another reason that we find it impossible to ignore and hugely annoying. But the rudeness certainly comes from removing yourself from the group and going no one here matters. I'm talking to Nigel. He's had a hair transplant.

Stay right there, more with Danny Wallace right after this break. Welcome back to Part Time Genius. We're talking to Danny Wallace. You know, one of the most amazing stories in your book is about a politician in Colombia who decided to fight rudeness, and to fight rudeness with mimes of all things, and I was hoping you could talk a little bit about that. Yeah, this is a guy stumbled across named Anthonys Marcus who is either the craziest politician in the

world or some kind of genius. And I think he's some kind of genius because he takes problems and he's sort of he comes up with what seem on paper to be insane ideas, insane solutions, and yet they seem to work. And this is a guy who had been kind of in charge like the chancellor thing or directorally university.

At Bogata University, Um, and there was like there was kind of some student unrest one day and there were hundreds and hund of the students all shouting, and he was on the stage and he was trying to calm them down, and they would not be calm him. They would not listen, they would not give him the time of day, and no matter what he did on that microphone,

they wouldn't shut up. And so he very calmly walked to the front of the stage, undid his belt, turned around, pulled down his trousers, and showed the world his ass, at which point every student was kind of silent and slacked George. No one knew why he was doing this. Had he gone mad, you know? Was he protesting their rudeness or was he being rude himself? And it was a massive scandal and every sort of newspaper was talking about it. Everyone was disgusted at his behavior. How could

he act that way? It was so rude, Um, And he ended up having to leave his job. But because he had done this current crazy thing, he was now in the public kind of consciousness. So when he then ran for there at a time when Bogutar was seen as pretty much the most um chaotic, let's stay city in the world, and there was corruption left right and center. They felt that this was a guy they could trust.

So he was, you know, put into power. But crucially, because he didn't owe anyone any favors, he could get rid of everyone that he felt was potentially corrupt and instead bring in a bunch of his friends, all of whom had crazy ideas like him. And they looked at the city and they saw what was going on, and they saw that people were driving in considerately, They were mounting the sidewalks, they were jaywalking left right and center.

They were being incredibly loud when when they shouldn't have been, you know, um, And he just thought, right, what do we do here? And just as you say, he did something a bit crazy, which was that he got rid of the vast majority of the notoriously corrupt traffic police and he replaced them with minds, so actual minds. So people dressed in black, the traditional white gloves, their faces

painted white. And he just unleashed this army of minds onto the streets and said, find rude behavior, find bad behavior, and call it out. So if you were someone who was saying jaywalking and there was traffic. You know, you're putting people in danger and you're doing what you shouldn't be doing. You might look behind you and find five or six mins who are copying you and mocking your walk, completely in front of the whole world, and it would

make you think twice about doing that again. Or if you'd part your car somewhere where you weren't allowed to park your car, you might suddenly find loads and loads of minds surrounding your car, just pointing at you and shaking their heads. And what it did was it made people accountable for their actions, but it also showed everybody else that, look, there's people on your side. So these rude people they're not being because you know, we're just

letting them anymore. They're breaking the rules, and we are sort of shaming them, but in a playful but powerful way. And the public started to join in, and he had more and more schemes that didn't just involve minds. I mentioned people being loud. You know, there might be playing there I guess back then their boom boxes and their

disco music or whatever it was about. Then, you know, loudly on the train, and suddenly a bunch of fellows dressed up as benedicting monks would get on um, you know and just put their fingers to their lips just to sort of highlights you know, their their their vow of silence and how you were impinging upon it. So there's all these kind of it was almost like almost like kind of weird hidden camera moments, except no one was really filming it. It was just there to show

the public. Look, we understand there's a way to behave and we're going to help you, and we're gonna puncture the kind of the aggression underneath it that it normally goes to and and we're going to show that that you've got people on your side. And it worked to

an astounding degree. You know, even homicides went down, um, just thanks to a series of kind of quite playful things and and and crucially um people offered to pay more tax just because the mayor said, listen to be really lovely if you would offer to pay more tax. So it just showed that people were hungry for a non rude world. But it felt like that chance had been lost at a time when Bogitar had gone crazy, and it just took one crazy guy to turn this around.

That's really such an incredible story. So I do want to get back to a little bit of how rudeness affects us. And I know in one part you talk about how, um, rudeness can sort of curb people's creativity, But I was also curious how rudeness can actually be dangerous in a medical context. When you talk a little

bit about that. Yeah, of course, UM, well, when someone has been unnecessarily rude to you, UM, it really does affect your brain, affects the frontal loads, which is responi was responsible for kind of working memory and whatever the task at hand is um, And studies were done that showed that, yes, absolutely, it doesn't make people less creative. So people were kind of surprised by rudeness um, and

then set simple tasks. They didn't realize that the rudeness was kind of part of it, so it would happen on the way into the experiment. But the people who had experienced rudeness found themselves far less able to, for example, come up with very simple anagrams or creative uses for a brick that was my favorite. Um. So they just couldn't come up with as many ideas as other people could.

The people who hadn't experienced any rudeness whatsoever. And it's been sort of shown time and time again just how much this affects us. I mean, there were studies done, I think in the seventies that showed that even just a loud noise changes we are and how much empathy we have. So if you had an old woman at the top of some stairs and to have shopping bag is broken and all her shopping is tumbling down the stairs and oranges and tin cans, but our instinct is

to run to her and to help her. But the science has shown that if someone nearby, and this is the crazy bit, if someone nearby is doing some gardening and has quite a lowed lawnmower, it affects us in such a way that we are much less likely to go and run to that woman's aid, because part of our brain is dealing with what's going on over here. So it's much the same when it comes to rudeness. Part of your brain is coping with that. And where it becomes very dangerous isn't when you're like a rioter

who hasn't been served the hot dog. It's much more when you have a position of you know, real authority or responsibility over other people's lives. So there were studies done in Tel Aviv with a bunch of surgeons, three groups of surgeons, and one of the groups in particular was told that while they were doing their simulated surgery on a on a on an infant um, they were going to be observed by a medical professional from America. And when that medical professional came over on Skype to

say hello to them, he was just very rude. He was very dismissive. He said he had no real respect for the medicinal community in the in Tel Aviv, and that you know, he wishes them well. Nonetheless, and when they went and did their surgery um, it was shown afterwards by an independent group that that team, in particular, those bunch of surgeons who had experienced rudeness, became less effective at the surgery they were doing. They didn't communicate well,

they picked up the wrong instruments. They would become fixated on the original diagnosis, so that if something changed that was really obvious, they would kind of ignore it because they couldn't deal with it at that time. They didn't resascitate properly, and essentially, the infant in the simulation would

have died had it been an actual of surgery. So that's when you start to see that, you know, rudeness which cuts to the very core of who we are and makes us feel disrespected and confuses us and bewilders us in those situations, and that's when big accidents can happen, medical errors can happen. It's been shown that truck drivers

with rude dispatches miss more stop science. Um so anyone, you know, if you have an airline pilot, you know, at least when they've had a drink, you know, you can you can sort of see their glassy eyes or see them sway around. But there's there are no clues when it comes to rudeness and what someone may have just experienced. And and that's when when I was writing the book, I started to realize just how dark this

can kind of get. Because we've always found rudeness to be quite amusing and we love, you know, rude people in sitcoms, whether it's Basil Faulty or the Supernancy or whatever, and we love changing stories, you know, about rudeness, but we don't really appreciate that it is genuinely a silent killer. If if someone's been rude to a doctor in the morning, it can affect the next five patients. So suddenly you start to see how it can affect all of us.

And when you've got the world's rudist man in the in the world's most powerful position, um, then you start to have problems. Yeah, it's a well, those are all scary situations. Though I don't think you should minimize the hot dog thing. I still can't get over that you didn't get a hot dog for an hour in a minute, but it will stay with you for quite some time

gractually of that day. You know. There there is a great story in the beginning of the book about someone who joins ISIS and is put off by the rudeness of that movement. And now obviously ISIS isn't something that we laugh about. But but honestly, that story was so funny.

Can you talk a little bit about that? Yeah, yeah, absolutely, This was This was a fellow who who decided to flee Britain Omar's saying, and he left his job as a I think he was a security gardener's supermarket, and he fled for the for the deserts where he could train with with isis and and really I put the story in to show that, you know, we all have different standards, were all quite different people, um, and yet

there are some things that unite almost everyone. Because he had gone he fled to the desert in order to essentially help bring down the very sort of tenets of Western civilization UM and do kind of unspeakable things and train for atrocities. But when he got there, he just found himself constantly annoyed because this this great brotherhood that he'd expected of people that thought like him and wanted

to attack the West. Sometimes would just unplug his phone and steal his phone charger for a while, which he thought was one step too far even for Ices. Or sometimes they'd sort of he'd take his shoes off to have a prey and then he'd be like, wearing my shoes and he'd look up and there'd be another this member who just taking his shoes, and he was like, this is this is not what I joined Ices for.

You know, we've got to standards here. And he would make dinner for them sometimes and he'd just be like, can you all just pipe down because all like grabbing at the food, and he's like, we're gonna have a system here, and he was just basically he was very disappointed at how immature, um, and how bad he brought

up a lot of terrorists seemed to be these days. Um. And it just made me think that, you know, even a man in this situation who has turned his back on all sorts of Western conventions and all sorts of standards of treating each other, even he can find himself annoyed at the kind of the minor injustices and sort of everyday monsters of polite society. You got it. You gotta do other lines somewhere, you know, Yeah, yeah, exactly.

I wouldn't last five minutes. And iis I'll tell you you do talk a little bit about a rudeness vaccine that they were testing on doctors, and what exactly would that involved. Well, it was great because this was just like a passing comment that one of the scientists that I talked to said. And his name is a mere Errors, and I think he's great. And there's a bunch of them. There's a bunch of these sort of like me, rudeness nerds, kind of like sculpting about the shadows, sort of stemp

in their little feet and going, why can't everything be better? Um? And Amir entered into sort of rudeness studies, if you like, um by thinking it was nonsense. He he just thought, you know, rudeness doesn't have an effect on anybody. It's just just a thing. It's just a thing that happens in your day. And he started to look into it, almost like just as a bet with one of his colleagues. And he told me, he said, every time I look into it, I find something else. And what I usually

find is shocking. Um. And we were talking about the doctor's thing and the idea that you know, like I say, someone being rude to a doctor doesn't just affect you know, the next person the doctor sees, but five people, um, you know, in in a in a in a row can be affected, according to the studies, by a moment of rudeness. And I said to him, you know, it's a silent killer. It's a sort of you know, we

we we need to be taking this a bit more seriously. Uh. And and he just sort of threw it away, this this idea that he said, you know, we're sort of working in a vaccine and I was like, what were you talking about? A vaccine, And it's kind of a video game that doctors can play at the very start of their day before anyone has even thought about being rude to them. So it's almost like and the Inoculation and they play this game and they're still working on it.

But however, it works and whatever it does helps to sort of free up those frontal lobes that often, like I say, get bogged down in the rudeness of things. So I suppose it just protects them, and whatever mental exercises it puts these doctors through just helps them too. I suppose take a breath or perhaps take a step back from the situation. Um. So I can't wait to find out more about it. That they're going to be

starting more studies. But it does show that a rudeness is being taken seriously and be steps are being made to to help us all deal with it. Um. Because you know when every time you get in a car, you know you're a dangerous a situation escalating. Well, we've got several more questions for you, Danny, but we'll be right back with Part Time Genius after the break. Welcome back to Part Time Genius. We're talking to Danny Wallace the author of f you very much understanding the culture

of rudeness and what we can do about it. So I wanted to ask you about Internet urals because we started a blog very early, uh at our former jobs and and it was sort of this warm and welcoming culture of people who read the posts and stuff, and it slowly grew into more of an aggressive community and more people who are more liberated to be trolley. And so our explanation was always it really is the anonymity of this that that people are just you know, at

home behind their screens. But you have a bit of a tweaked reason for it. Could you explain that? Yeah, I think we've always traditionally said, you know, it's it's the anonymity of the Internet that is that is the problem.

And certainly, um it is quite free. UM it allows um, you know, the anonymity, and in a sense it is a beautiful thing because in the early days it meant that people who, for example, UM, felt uncomfortable coming out could could find other people like them but didn't feel that they were risking anything at that at that point, and they could they could find other people like them who were at the same point in time and encourage at each other, and it was seen as quite you know,

it was a great thing. And then of course the rise of of the of the trolls, it just made us immediately think, well, actually, anonymity is a terrible thing. What studies have shown is really it's a lack of eye contact that is the huge problem. Um. I was talking earlier about how difficult it is to have, you know, the looking glass held up to you if you're a rude person, because you you see yourself through the eyes

of others. That's why it's also very difficult for people to be certainly as rude to each other faces, because you're there's something called the looking glass self, which is we are always looking into the eyes of others for how we are coming across. Does this person like me? Have I offended them? How am I doing you know in life in their eyes? Um And a lack of eye contact with with the internet means that people can

be free to be as rude as they want. Again, tests were done in hyper I think in Israel, where they had an office full of people and some of them were made to just sit opposite the person they had to kind of work with, and some had to use like instant messenger or something to to to work together with people. And they found far and away that the people who would be much more aggressive with each other were the ones who simply couldn't see each other.

So you know, it's it's there is a certain freedom in in the anonymity, but I would say there's much more freedom and in knowing that person just can't see you. I know that you referred to a certain politician and some celebrity judges and Basil Faulty. And why do you think it is that we are so attracted to rudeness. Well, I think we're at a point where rudeness it's sort

of helping people achieve strange ambitions. Rudeness more than ever is everywhere, and it's getting worse, and it tumbles from

our phones. And every time we switch on the TV, um, two people who are pretending to be journalists having a fight, um, uh, you know about whatever has just happened on cable news, and then they bring in another person, uh, and and it just feels angrier and narrower and coarser, And everyone's got to have an opinion on everything all the time, even if they know nothing about the thing they're trying to say, they've got the opinion on, and the opinion has to be put in in a very short and

forthright way to cut through the noise of everyone else's opinions and must then be broadcast to everybody else because we're all so important. Um, the people on reality TV shows, it's just taught us that meanness should be rewarded because they're the people who make the edit. Um, the highest paid talent judges are always the mean ones. Um. So everywhere we turn, we're being kind of tall that that to be rude, to be to lack empathy in a

in a sense, um, it is a good thing. You know, journalists find they get more clicks if if if they if they write the horrible thing in a horrible way. Um. So so it I sort of felt this kind of this ground swell, and it came at a time where you know, like Trump for example, UM yeah, a lot of what he ran on was this this kind of mavericks sort of. I tell it like it is. I'm only being honest. I'm just saying what everyone else is thinking. And and those are all things that came from reality

TV as well. You know, all these people are going, I just tell it like it is. I'm a truth teller. You know, it's refreshing. You can't argue with it. And really, when these people say they're being honest, they're not being honest at all. They're just putting forward an opinion, but saying it's just honest. It's like it's get out clause, because we're suddenly not allowed to argue with you if you're being honest, and in fact, we've got to all stand around and applaud you for being so brave as

to be honest. And so, for whatever reason, Reality TV Online personas the rise of powerful rude people. Um, we're kind of being taught again and again that rudeness works and politeness is weak. I think that's the thing now thinking about it, I think that's what I'm getting at, is that we see manners as weakness, and we see

empathy as weakness, and we see rudeness of strength. Well, actually, along those lines, you talk about the possibility of empathy training in schools and how it could help teenagers at that stage in their lives. I mean, what would that look like? Do you think, well, yeah, it's a strange one. I mean, you know, part of me kind of books at phrases like that kind of empathy training because it just sounds so wishy washy and sort of a bit nonsensical.

It's like, how can you train for empathy? Um And Yet people have sort of shown in in in studies that it sort of can be taught, and it can be exercised like a muscle, you know, it can be grown in people. And I suppose it's just highlighting um. You know here basically it boils down to this rudeness is just kind of ignoring how another person feels and just doing what you feel, no matter who gets hurt. And politeness tends to be a system I've sort of

shared empathy. You know, I think etiquette is so outdated, but politeness is really the main thing. And that just means, you know, you're slightly happier when someone says please you, You feel seen when someone says thank you. If you hold a door open just for a couple of seconds for someone who's you know, struggling with some bags, you both feel better for it. Um and And these are things that we learn instinctively and we have used for millennia,

and it's a system that works. Um And you know, I think that that turning our back on that empathy is is a bad thing. I'm not sure I would, you know, I we would need empathy training in schools. But but for the kids. But perhaps m I don't know, perhaps perhaps just highlighting how people are seen through the eyes of others as a good thing, which essentially is

what the guy in Columbia was doing. You know, he was holding a looking glass up to those people like almost sort of you know it sort of isn't the looking glass of mime, isn't it? Because the mind was mimicking them and showing them what they were doing, So it was kind of a mobile mirror. And when you see your own actions through the eyes of others and how you're coming across, that's when you tend to change your behavior. But it's such a strange but but interesting idea.

And honestly, even the idea that a mime or god forbid, multiple mimes might show up if I do something rude, would probably influence my behavior anyway. Yeah, well, we all know what we're getting you for your birthdays. Well, Danny, this has been a ton of fun, not it all. I'm so happy about how polite we've all been to one another today. You've you've been, You've been absolutely wonderful. We should be very proud. Thank you very much, and I hope all of our listeners will check out the book.

It's f you very much understanding the culture of rudeness and what we can do about it. But Danny, thanks so much for being on the program. Thanks thanks again for listening. Part Time Genius is a production of how stuff works and wouldn't be possible without several brilliant people who do the important things we couldn't even begin to understand. Tristan McNeil does the editing thing. Noel Brown made the theme song and does the MIXI mixy sound thing. Jerry

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