Thoughts on sports and trash-talking in real-life (Muhammad Ali) or a football field, to the movies (Apollo Creed) to even comedy actors in wrestling like Andy Kaufman.

How trash-talking is used as an effective form of intimidation in life.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dUh1XBeW0zw

Transcription

Does trash-talking work?

Hi I'm Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

Today I wanted to talk about this, is kind of a second in the series that we're doing, having to do with manipulation through marketing, and just a general manipulation to human beings.

It just happens. It's automatic and understanding these elements of human behavior, allows you to communicate with people better in your marketing, and also to not fall into a lot of the traps that people tend to fall into.

When you're dealing with trying to get people to do what you want them to do, which is what really what marketing and sales are about. You're trying to encourage people to do a certain thing. And hopefully, it's a good thing.

But it makes no difference whether it's a good thing or a bad thing, the same principles in place.

And so what I'm going to talk about is trash-talking.

Trash-talking and sports is a model for something. It's a model for intimidation. It's a model for getting attention. It's a model for outrageousness.

It happens on so many different levels with humans, but sports is just an obvious place. And one of the most obvious places I've got a book here I've shown it before. This is a really good book by Bob Zmuda, on Andy Kaufman.

Andy Kaufman was a comedian in the 70s and 80s, who really got into he always enjoyed the theatrical of the whole thing, and was very much a well, very much a performance artist.

He would enjoy professional wrestling before professional wrestling really went mainstream in the 80s and 90s. And he got into the trash-talk persona, and able to really put it out there.

It's what wrestling is professional wrestling is known for American professional wrestling is known for you would not have really, I don't know, maybe a third or a half of the entire performance that happens is this back and forth trash-talking, which is just intimidation, outrageousness, making outrageous statements, and you see it in the most extreme form there.

But you also see it on a level of professional sports, when we're talking about Muhammad Ali, one of the best trash-talkers of all time, in terms of just saying these outrageous statements about how great he was about how he was going to destroy the other person.

In an almost poetic way, he would get away with this outrageous talk. And people loved it, they enjoy it, they love hearing it, they know it's partially a game, it's partially just a process.

But at the same time, there's an intimidation factor that happens.

So when I played football in high school, the same thing would occur, you'd have some guy on the other side of the field, and I was aligned. You'd have some guy on the other side, just saying the most outrageous things about your mother and everything else, just to intimidate just to get you to react. This is what we talked a lot about yesterday about that reaction factor, there has to be a reaction at some point.

Either you're reacting to them, or they're reacting to you or you're able to stand outside of that game, and not play it. But there tends to be a reaction back and forth.