Something You Should Know - Are You Revealing Too Much or Not Enough? & How We Absorb Technology

Episode Date: March 12, 2026

How you think about getting older might be more powerful than you realize. Scientists have uncovered an unexpected connection between people’s beliefs about aging and what happens to them as the years go by. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/12150226/ We’re often warned not to reveal too much about ourselves. Oversharing can make people uncomfortable, right? Maybe. But Harvard Business School professor Leslie John argues the bigger problem may actually be the opposite — sharing too little. In her book Revealing: The Underrated Power of Oversharing (https://amzn.to/3ME0EVt), she explains how thoughtfully sharing personal thoughts, experiences, and vulnerabilities can strengthen relationships, build trust, and even improve professional success. Humans have a strange relationship with technology. Some innovations instantly become essential while others quietly disappear. New technology can spark excitement, fear, resistance, and creativity all at once. Vanessa Chang, Director of Programs at Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology and author of The Body Digital: A Brief History of Humans and Machines from Cuckoo Clocks to ChatGPT (https://amzn.to/4cqHjBE), explores how people historically absorb new technologies — and how those tools reshape the way we interact with each other and the world. When you buy new clothes, it feels natural to wear them right away. After all, they’re brand new. But “new” doesn’t necessarily mean clean. In fact, clothing can go through quite a journey before it reaches your closet — one that may make you think twice before wearing it straight off the rack. https://www.southernliving.com/should-you-wash-new-clothes-before-wearing-11885557 PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS QUINCE: Don't keep settling for clothes that don't last! Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Quince.dom/sysk ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too! SHOPIFY: See less carts go abandoned with Shopify and their Shop Pay button! Sign up for your $1 per month trail and start selling today at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Shopify.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ EXPEDITION UNKOWN: We love the Expedition Unknown podcast from Discovery! Listen wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Visit medcan.com slash moments to get started. Today, on something you should know, what you think about getting older can impact just how much older you get. Then the problem of oversharing, revealing too much, it may not be the problem you think it is. The line between TMI, too much information and the bigger danger, in my opinion, TLI, to little information, that line, you can go further towards TMI than you think you can in all kinds of contexts. Also, new clothes are not necessarily clean clothes. And the interesting way humans slowly adapt to new technology, then we can't live without it. There was a study some years ago that tried to trace how many times someone touched their phone in the day.

The estimate was 2,600 times just for the average user. And power users over 5,000? All this today on something you should know. You know, I'm a sucker for a good mystery. Like, in the 1950s, a flight from New York to Minneapolis just disappeared over Lake Michigan. No wreckage, no answers. Or the Diet Love Pass incident, a group of experienced hikers found dead under circumstances so strange, people still debate what really happened.

There's a podcast called Expedition Unknown from Discovery, hosted by Josh Gates, and this is what he does. He doesn't just tell these stories. He goes there. He's hunted for priceless artifacts stolen by the Nazis in World War II. He's traced the final flight of a pilot who vanished mid-mission and searched the Great Lakes for a ship that disappeared without a trace. If you love the unanswered questions of history, you know, the stuff that makes you lean in. You're going to love this.

Travel the globe with Josh Gates as he investigates humanity's greatest feats and most iconic legends. Listen to Expedition Unknown, wherever you get your podcast. 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. So, no matter how old you are right now, you will get older. And how you view that process can add or subtract years from your life. I know it sounds amazing, and that's why we're going to start this episode of something you should know by talking about it. Hi, I'm Mike Carruthers.

So in a landmark study from Yale, researchers found that people who have a positive view of aging live seven and a half years longer than those who believe that getting older meant decline. Same access to health care, same general life conditions. The only measurable difference was, And it doesn't stop there. People who see aging as growth instead of decay show better memory retention, faster walking speed, lower risk of dementia, and better recovery after illness. And the reason is that beliefs don't just sit in your head. They shape your behavior, stress levels, even cardiovascular response. If you expect decline, you unconsciously live into it. If you expect growth,

you behave differently and your body follows. So maybe the better question isn't how old are you. It's what do you believe about getting older? And that is something you should know. We've all been warned to be careful what you share. Don't reveal too much. Don't overshare. Keep some things to yourself.

And we've all experienced the other side of that, the person who tells us way more than we ever wanted to know. But what have we been getting this wrong? What if sharing more, not less, actually builds trust, strengthens relationships, and even creates professional opportunities? What if oversharing isn't a liability but a hidden advantage? My guest says the instinct to hold back may be costing you more than you realize. Leslie John is a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School, and she studies how people make decisions.

about what to reveal and what to conceal and what those choices mean for connection, persuasion, and success. She's the author of the book, Revealing, the Underrated Power of Oversharing. Hi, Leslie. Welcome to something you should know. Hi, thanks for having me. So you're a professor at Harvard Business School, and this topic about oversharing seems maybe a little outside the scope of that. So I'm curious what your interest is, in this topic? Yeah. My interest in this is that I have realized the benefits of opening up even just a little bit more in your personal and professional lives. I've actually come to believe that we're not born as open people or closed people. Rather, revealing is a skill

that we can develop. And it's not about being open all the time or closed all the time. it's about knowing when to open up to whom and how much and why. Yeah. Well, that seems to be the magic that a lot of people probably do get right and a lot of us get it wrong and regret it later. Yeah, yeah, that's true. But the thing is, with the regret aspect, yes, I mean, I, as a card carrying over sharer in many respects, I have felt many disclosure hangovers, right? It's the day after you've told one too many embarrassing stories or said one too many sensitive things at a party and you're cringing.

You're like, oh my God, I can't believe I did that. You live with this sting, this cringe. That definitely sucks. But the thing is, it's much shorter lived than we think it is. And what it's often replaced with is something much more meaningful. So some of my worst overshares, like sharing my most embarrassing moment to, a group of senior colleagues. I definitely had a disclosure hangover the next day, but those senior colleagues actually ended up being some of my closest mentors. And I don't think it was in spite of the

sharing. It was in part because of it. Because why? What happened? Why do you think that was effective in connecting you better? That's a great question. The fundamental thing is trust. So when you open up and share something a little edgy, a little sensitive, a sensitive thought or a feeling, you're like relinquishing control to the universe. You're saying to the person implicitly, I trust you to not use this against me, to not make a fool out of me. You're literally showing, you're modeling because you're taking a risk. So you're showing that you're trusting, you trust the person. And when you do that, it causes them to trust you more. And that is the foundation of all human relationships, right? Trust. Trust is social currency. And you can't just say, hey, I'm trustworthy. You have to show it by doing something inherently risky. And opening up is something that is inherently risky. It for sure has dangers, but the upside we often don't anticipate. Yeah. Well, I guess the question then is like, well, where's the line between

enough sharing and too much sharing. I mean, how do you know where that is? Yeah, that's a million-dollar question. I can't tell you it's here exactly at this spot all the time. That's not realistic because it depends on so much. But what I can tell you is the line between TMI, too much information, and the bigger danger, in my opinion, TLI, to little information, that line, you can go further towards TMI than you think you can in all kinds of context.

So, for example, we had a series of studies where we had people watch a video of a manager. And they watched the manager introduce themselves. And we asked the people in the study, how much do you trust like the manager, how much you want to work for them? And is this person competent? And what we did was we just varied how much the manager self-disclosed, how vulnerable they got in this intro. So the key thing was in one of the versions, they basically didn't say anything vulnerable. In another version, they said, sometimes I get nervous public speaking, right? So that's sharing something vulnerable, sharing a weakness, which a manager ordinarily wouldn't do.

So that's one version. Another version is a little bit further where they said, I sometimes get nervous public speaking. Sometimes my hands get sweaty. Okay? So just another level. And then the final level was all of that plus piled on. And sometimes I have full-blown panic attacks. And what we wanted to see there is your question, where is the line?

Well, the line is further than you think. So people, the first, the version where the person, the manager didn't say anything vulnerable, that was actually one of the versions where people trusted the manager. are the least. Again, because they're not opening up. They're not taking any social risk. But then the two middle ones where they said, sometimes nervous public speaking, and then even further, my hands get sweaty. They still trusted the person wanted to work for them, even more so than when they said nothing. The only time when it kind of started to backfire in that you kind of started to think, is this person competent, was that extreme version where full-blown panic attacks. Okay,

So that's TMI there. But saying as a manager, you're sometimes nervous about public speaking and even going so far as to say, and sometimes I feel my palms get a little sweaty, like showing a little bit more of the physiological symptoms, it actually caused people to trust them more and be more willing to work for them relative to when they weren't vulnerable at all. And it didn't make the people think the manager was incompetent at all. Rather, they're more relatable. I say this to say that, you know, we've done many, many experiments in love, romance, and all kinds of different contexts, personal, professional, and the line is a little bit further than where you think it is. When you describe the experiences you've had where you had that hangover the next day, isn't that telling you something?

Is that a false alarm or is it really maybe you did? So it could be. Oversharing is alive and well. TMI is definitely a problem still. But what I would encourage people to do is I wouldn't take your cue from the immediate aftermath necessarily that it was a mistake. You've got to kind of look at the long game. And one way to describe this is to tell you about how what people tend to regret in life,

in interactions, and not. what they don't regret. So it turns out that what it's something like 76% of the types of regrets that people have are regrets over things they did not do, like, including sharing, right? Not sharing. So you're much more likely to regret over time in the long run. You're more likely to regret the things that you did not do over the things that you did. Now, in the immediate aftermath, we often regret the things we did more than the things we didn't do. But in And over the course of time, this pattern reverses such that we end up regretting the things that we didn't do.

And that's where undersharing is so problematic because it's a life of missed opportunities, right? When we don't share, we miss connections. We have colleagues that don't quite trust us. We have relationships that don't spark. The other thing I would say on regret that I found when I was researching this book that really, really shaped my thinking on this was how, There's a palliative care nurse by the name of Brony Ware, and she's obviously spent a lot of time with people in their final days. And she wrote a book on the top five things that people regret most in life when they're dying.

Four out of five of those regrets are things that they did not do. And number three, the number three most common regret is, literally, I wish I had shared my feelings more. So that's real food for thought. Yeah, that's really food for thought. And it seems so true. If you even, you don't have to wait until you're almost dead to figure it out either. If you stop and think about it, what are the things you regret right now are probably things you did not do or did not say rather than things you did.

Yeah. Yeah. And one of the things I think that is really, really tricky, one of the hardest reveals is sharing strong feelings, saying you love someone, saying you're, into them. And so I did a study where I asked people, hey, when you said, when you were the first to say I love you, did the person reciprocate or did you get jilted? I didn't use the term jilted, but you know what I mean? I said, was it reciprocated or not? And guess what percent of the time it was reciprocated? 85. That is almost on the nose. It's about 80 percent. And I wouldn't have

guess that because me, catastrophic thinker, you know, I'm thinking, oh my gosh, it's so threatening if you get rejected, right? Being rejected by a romantic interest is like one of the most primally difficult kinds of rejection we can get. And so my prior going into this study was like, you know, maybe you get reciprocated 40% of the time. I don't know, maybe this is revealing something about my love life or misses. But that was so assuaging to me that 80% percent. percent of the time when, you know, when you feel like it's the right thing to do. And so the other thing to keep in mind is when you do get rejected, yeah, that sucks. It stings in the short run. But at least you know it saves you from endlessly cycling and wondering and staying with the wrong person, right?

So there's, again, even when it, when it stings, the long-term payoff seems actually quite good. We're talking about oversharing and undersharing in the pros and cons of both, and my guest is Leslie John. She's a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and author of Revealing the Underrated Power of Oversharing. I love the Regency era. You might know it as the time when Bridgeton takes place, or is the time when Jane Austen wrote her books.

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this show breaks down Real Housewives Reality TV and the moments everyone's group chat is arguing about. Bracanne's been spilling Bravo T since 2010, and yes, we've interviewed Housewise Royalty like Countess LeWan and Teresa Judice, Smart Recaps, Insider Energy, and Zero Fluff. Listen to All About Tierage podcasts on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen, new episodes weekly. So, Leslie, I'm wondering, I don't know if you could study this, maybe somebody has, but when you have one of those hangovers where you feel, oh, my God, I said way too much.

And often, you know, alcohol is involved when that happens. Truth. Do the other people that you told think you shared too much? That's a great question. Say more about where you're coming from. Well, I just wonder, is it a false concern? You think you shared too much. Why did I say that?

But are other people going home going, gee, why did Bob say that? My sense is that people go home and worry about what they said. They don't really remember all that much about what you said anyway. Completely. In fact, people are often happy that you shared to them, right? It's because if we come back to trust, they feel flattered that you opened up to them. So while you're over there with a disclosure hangover, they're like, oh, wow, that person was so brave. I'm so flattered.

That means they trust me. I can't wait to spend more time with them and learn more about them and share what's on my mind with them. Maybe they'll be able to help me with some of the things I'm struggling with, right? So that's kind of, that's the core of friendship. And yet it's sad that the day after we just kind of feel badly about ourselves when we oftentimes, it's often misplaced, as you say. Well, a lot of, well, pretty much all of what you've talked about is, is when, you share things about yourself. A lot of people overshare things about other people that,

and the conversation starts with, you know, I really shouldn't tell you this, but. And maybe you really shouldn't. Maybe you really shouldn't tell me that because you're saying something out of turn. It's not your place. This isn't your thing to say. You've hit on something that is a common overshare, right?

There are certain categories of things. People often ask me, like, what do we tend to overshare and undershare? massively we undershare our feelings. But gossip, saying negative things about someone, talking smack about people behind their back, that is an overshare. You're exactly right. And why is that oversharing? It's because it erodes trust, right?

So the person that you confide in, well, confide is the wrong word, the person you fetch to and gossip to that you say negative things about someone else to, that'll give you maybe a short, term hit of pleasure, right? Like, it's kind of fun sometimes and juicy to do this. But the long game is not so good because the person you say the thing to, they're going to wonder, if you do this enough, they're going to wonder, hmm, what do they say behind my back? What do they say about me? And that fundamentally erodes trust, setting aside the fact that it's an unkind thing to do. But you're exactly right. Well, talk about the difference between sharing information and sharing feelings, because, you know, you can share either one, but sharing your feelings, I don't know. A friend of mine was

telling me about how they were in a PTA meeting. They're part of the Parent Teacher Association, and they have a pretty good group, you know, they're affable and they get along pretty well. But things weren't moving in this meeting, and it was really frustrating, and they weren't making progress. And my friend said, you know, I thought of you and I thought of the feelings about sharing feelings. And so I went out on a limb and I said, I am feeling really, really frustrated and disappointed that we're not making more progress. I don't think she said it as firmly as I just said it now. She said it a little bit more graciously. But she said, she told me then, once I shared my feelings.

it was a total game changer. People rallied behind it. Other people said, oh, you know, I've been feeling frustrated too. I'm so glad you said that. And then it actually ended up being constructive. So, you know, when we say, open up a bit more, share your feelings, you know, it sounds kind of cheesy, like, oh, I'll share your feelings. But like, this is a really tangible thing that you can do that has, that is a, can be a

complete game changer in many social interactions. Well, it seems to me when you stop and think, about it, people worry about their own oversharing, like I'm, maybe I said too much, but that's not how other people, I guess it depends on what it is you said, but, but generally I think we're more self-critical than other people are critical about our oversharing. Yeah, and in fact, that's like basic cognitive behavioral therapy, right, that the foundation of it, which is getting out of your head and realizing that people don't know. the things about you that you think they notice, right? Like, get out of your head. It's not all about you. We're inherently kind of self-absorbed

in a way that hurts ourselves, right? Because we think that people are constantly judging us and when in reality, oftentimes they don't notice. And when they do with sharing, they're often happy and flattered that we share. There is one area, though, I have to say that But so in this vein of like we often get to have a good feel for it when we're when we're starting to date someone, when we're getting to know someone, this often comes really naturally to us, right? This kind of dance of reciprocity, this mutual gradually escalating self-disclosure.

Where our instincts can go awry is actually in long-term relationships because one of the things that happens is long-term. is long-term, intimate close relationships, the longer we're with someone, of course, the more we know about them. But the problem is that our confidence that we know everything about them outpaces our actual knowledge of them. So that's where the trouble begins, right?

Because if we're more confident that we know what our partner is thinking and feeling, if we're confident that we know that when, like more confident than we should be, then we stop asking, we stop sharing. And then we start to grow apart, right? And so you see like a lot of long-term relationships. It's often not some catastrophic event of cheating or something that makes them break up. It's rather you wake up after 10 years and you realize, wait, I don't feel understood and known and I don't feel I know them. And the root cause of that is undersharing. So in the last moments here, what is it you want people to take from this? What's the

advice? I want people to ask themselves, what is the price I might be paying? What is the price I'm already paying for not opening up, for not saying the thing? Because silence is not neutral. silence charges interest the other thing that i wanted to say on the point about relationships growing apart is there is a personality trait so one of your questions you know is there a do people are people chronic overshares or undershares there's a personality trait called mind reading expectations which is as it sounds it is the tendency to believe that your partner should just know how you feel, that they should be able to intuit your thoughts. You shouldn't have to say your needs. They should just know, which when I say that out loud, it sounds, as my grandmother would

say, nutty noodle, right? Of course, people can't read each other's minds, but the problem with this belief is that it's really insidious. And there's a scale, you know, psychologists, we love scales, where you can measure this in yourself. And I did this myself. I measured my own, how high am I in mind-reading expectations? And my, I'm very high in this trait. But it was liberating, learning this about myself because as soon as I learned that my instinct is to like expect implicitly that my husband can intuit what I need all the time. Once I knew that I have this tendency, what does it mean? It means that I need to tell him. I need to share more. I need to tell him what I need. Tell him how I feel. Well, when you listen to this discussion, it's kind of like it's taking a problem

off the table that people, if they worry about oversharing, it's probably overblown. And maybe the bigger problem is undersharing and what we're missing by not sharing more. I've been talking to Leslie John. She is a professor of business administration at Harvard Business School and author of the book Revealing the Underrated Power of Oversharing. And there's a link to her book in the show notes. Ah, where are my gloves? Come on, heat. Winter is hard, but your groceries don't have to be.

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like software development and information technology. Learn more at aboutamazon.ca. When we talk about technology today, it often sounds like we're living through something completely unprecedented. Computers, artificial intelligence, driverless cars, machines that seem to think and create even imitate us. But our complicated relationship with technology didn't start with computers or smartphones. It began centuries ago, with things as simple as cuckoo clocks, eyeglasses, player pianos,

all kinds of things that introduced new ways of maneuvering through the world. My guest, Vanessa Chang, argues that the story of humans and machines is not new. It's ongoing. And the panic, the optimism, the utopian, promises and the apocalyptic fears we see today are nothing new. Vanessa is director of programs at Leonardo, the International Society for the Arts, Sciences, and Technology. And she is author of a book called The Body Digital, a brief history of humans and machines from Kuku clocks to chat CPT. Hi, Vanessa, welcome to something you should know. Hi, thank you for having me. Sure. Well, I was just

thinking the other day I was talking to someone about, you know, there are people, plenty of people still alive today who can remember a time before television, let alone video and Netflix and all of that, but just basic television. Plenty of us remember a time before cell phones, let alone smartphones. And now so many of these technologies have become not only part of our lives, but integral. I mean, go walk down the street. Everybody's got their face buried in a phone. And it's become part of who we are. And yet, it wasn't that long ago when it was impossible to imagine. Yeah, you're absolutely right. You know, I was talking to a colleague the other day when we were having technological issues, because even though there's a kind of magic

to everything, you know, there's always frustrations. And I was just marveling at Zoom and video chat at the future that's arrived and how mundane it is. You know, you're right. And it's really transformative in how we conduct ourselves and how we, you know, move through the world and how we talk to each other. But it's not just the current technology. I mean, technology and the body go way back, right? I mean, way back. Oh, yeah, absolutely. The most surprising history that I like to think about in setting some kind of historical precedent or moment for thinking about technologies, really kind of one of those prosaic ones, writing. It's something that so many of us do and that we're kind of trained to do. And I don't know about you.

I was trained to do cursive in school. There's a lot that you need to do in your body to learn how to write. But I think it also has a lot of implications for how we think. And writing has really been tremendous in extending our minds out into the world. It allows us to put our thoughts out on print. ways that mean we can talk to people after we die. And, you know, it helps us think through things in ways that aren't always possible if you can't kind of see your thoughts reflected outside of your body. So, you know, for me, I think that's a really important way of thinking through some of

the emerging technologies now, like AI, that look like they're really transformative and they look like they're going to really change the way we think. That, you know, this is part of a long history that, you know, how we think, how we write, how we express, how we use our hands, all of that has been just an ongoing dialogue, right, with technologies for thousands and thousands of years. But what I find interesting is that a lot of technology doesn't just respond to a need. It creates a need or it further creates the need. You know, people got along just fine without cell phones, smartphones, you know, where the only phone was the one on your kitchen wall. You know, life went on. People seem to get along okay. But now everybody has a phone, and that technology created, like, created its own demand.

Like when, you know, when a caveman's, you know, drawing pictures on a cave wall with a stick, well, that makes writing kind of hard, but you invent the pen and the paper, and now writing's pretty easy. And so it becomes more popular. Yeah. I mean, there's a whole, I think, feedback loop between, you know, that moment of using a stick and, you know, and simply just a person with a stick or some kind of tool making some kind of mark on the world. And the whole kind of infrastructure that gets built around it, I mean, the fact that you have a pen in your room to be able to write on a piece of paper that so much comes together and kind of colludes to produce that moment. You know, it's that you go to school, that your teacher puts that pen in your hand, makes you teach you how to hold it, disciplines you so you're writing neatly in line so other people can understand what you're writing. And of course, you need to know how to read.

The term I often use is discipline. It sounds a bit strict, I suppose, but it is a form of discipline, right? Like you're trained, your body's trained. It's trained by these systems and infrastructure so that you can participate in them. And because of that, you can have these really profound individual moments of expression, too. So pick an example of the body and technology, either in history or current, just to give people a sense of what you're talking about, but to illustrate how powerful all of this is and worth talking about.

Yeah. Yeah, another interesting example is the example of the voice. Our voices are a really kind of primal object. They really communicate who we are, and they're really kind of fundamentally connected to our breath and to our bodies. They're really expressive of life. And in speaking before technology, voices disappear, you know, when people die. I mean, your voice actually in speech disappeared in the moment immediately after it was spoken.

So when you have something like sound recording technology in the late 19th century that emerges, this is a moment when the voice becomes transformed into an object, and it's separated from our bodies, much in the way that writing could separate our thoughts from our bodies too. And when that happens, suddenly the voice becomes something that can live on after you die. this becomes, when the sound becomes an object, suddenly we can play with it in lots of different ways. And that status that it has as, you know, a marker of human identity starts to become really troubled.

You don't see that, you don't think about that so much at the moment sound recording gets invented, but you see it now and you see it when you think about things like music recording and copyright and, you know, the way people are struggling to contain something like vocal, deep-faced, where voices can be reproduced in ways that are completely untethered from who we are. Well, that's, you know, I hadn't thought of that, but that's really remarkable when you think about it, because somebody's voice has always been like a fingerprint, like you know their voice and they know your voice,

and so you know you're talking to that person, but technology has made it such that you don't know that anymore. Yeah, absolutely. You don't know that. You know, hip-hop artists in the 1970s started to kind of play with, focal samples and start to do really interesting things about it. And it did, you know, stir a lot of these anxieties about identity and not knowing where we are, but also kind of really interesting and cool music. And then when it comes to vocal deep fakes, you know, there's some people are using it to restore voices when they've lost them, right? Val Kilmer, for example, lost his voice to, I think it was throat cancer. And he worked with an AI company to create a vocal clone that was trained on, because he's got a huge archive as an actor,

lots of material and voice data to work with. So he could kind of create a vocal clone for himself. And it wasn't like connected to his body in the same way, but it sounded like him. It had his fingerprint because it was rooted in his voice. So there's a lot to be excited about, but so too a lot to be troubled by. What are you troubled by, just the fact that it could be fake? Well, it could be fake. I know that the sophistication of scammers is getting to the point with AI that it's really hard to distinguish, you know, when someone is calling you and, you know, it used to just be, they needed to be trickster enough to fool you. Now they could sound like someone you know, right?

or they could replicate your voice for kind of vocal ideas. There's that, too. And then there's also kind of questions when it comes to ownership and identity. You get people who, particularly vocal actors, who may not have known that their voices were being used for a particular purpose. I read this fascinating story about the voice of Siri, actually. She was a voice actress, and she was called into a song. studio years ago and asked to record, you know, a whole suite of different phrases and sounds. She never knew what she was doing. And then some time later, Siri came out and a family friend

called her and was like, is this you? So suddenly her voice is out in the world and it's recognizable enough that her family members could, could ask, you know, is this you? It sounds like you. But she didn't have control over it anymore. It's, you know, it's your, she's, you know, Her voice is in dialogue and in service to millions and millions of people around the world. What about the phone? I mean, it has become so ubiquitous. It is just kind of taken over everybody's life. How did that happen?

I mean, what is it about that device that makes it so I can't do without it? You know, there's the way it fits physically into our lives. You know, I often think about one of the. preemptive technologies of the phone, the Palm Pilot. The Palm Pilot was an early kind of personal organizer in the late 90s. My mother is a major early adopter and she had a Palm Pilot. And the designer of the Palm Pilot in trying to kind of figure out how it best kind of fit to people's lives actually walked around with this piece of wood that was shaped the same kind size and weight as the object and carry it around for a long time, you know, to see if it would

fit into his life. You know, and then there's other kind of early technologies like the Walkman and the MP3 player that start to bring moments of convenience and kind of like personal control over music into our lives that I think all of all of which come together to prime our bodies, whether it's our ears or our hands for physically kind of carrying these convenient objects around. And then the other thing I think is really about corporate design. You know, when it comes to phones, we use them to connect in ways that are convenient, but that allow us to consume things.

You know, maybe it's your calendar, but maybe it's Amazon. Maybe it's music. There's a lot that allows you access and kind of give you freedom to do. And it's physically designed in a way that it can just kind of sit so neatly into your hand. And then it comes to that there's this dialogue between a phone and your own kind of embodiment that that really starts to cement that relationship. You know, there was a study some years ago that tried to trace how many times someone touched their phone in the day. And the estimate was 2,600 times a day just for the average user. What would?

I know. And power users, over 5,000, just try and wrap your head around that. So there's this kind of physicality. Wait a minute. Wait a minute. What do you mean by touch your phone? Like if you dial a number that seven touches? I'm not sure the answer to that.

But I would consider that one. Because that sounds like an awfully large number. But think about like, I don't know if you wear a watch. I no longer wear a watch. So I pick up the phone to check the time. I pick up the phone to send messages, to listen to music, to send an email, to check on, you know, maybe buy something. I see people kind of nervously touching their phones. It used to be, I'm of the time kind of just as cigarettes kind of transitioned out of public spaces so much.

But it used to be when people were waiting, they were kind of fiddling with something like a cigarette, right? Now they just fiddle with their phones. Right. Yeah. That has always fascinated me how it's become the go-to thing to do when you have an idle moment. Well, I'm standing here waiting for something. Let me pull my phone out. Not let me talk to somebody or read a book, but it's always pull my phone out. Absolutely. I think it's increasingly difficult to just be present and be okay with sitting in your body. And I think there are larger reasons for that around like expectations of kind of productivity and the world that we live in and kind of the aesthetics of distraction. You know, you don't have to kind of sit in the nervousness, I guess, of life because I don't know about you. I actually think life isn't always comfortable, right?

There's a discomfort to a lot of life. And particularly if you're moving through the world or waiting for someone or trying to kind of be on a train, it's not that pleasant, say, sitting on a train in rush hour. But if you can be distracted by it or do something else, not have to, I don't know, make eye contact with someone else, then it just lubricates that a little bit, makes that kind of life a bit less, you know, a bit less frictionful. Well, what you said a moment ago, I hadn't really thought about that, but the power and the popularity of the phone didn't just happen. There was, it makes you wonder like how well adopted would the phone have been if it just showed up

and hadn't been preceded by the Palm Pilot, the Walkman, the iPod, that this kind of warmed us up to this all-in-one device that we'd already been used to carrying something around and now this is everything. This is the story that I really want to surface in thinking about contemporary technologies and the kind of technological history that preceded them. All of all of the behaviors that we have and the interactions we have are absolutely primed by technologies in the past. You know, I think about something like Spotify and the algorithmic curator. If, you know, I have really mixed feelings about the Spotify curator and the kind of songs that are selected for me. Because sometimes it is exactly what I want. And it's like, hey, this algorithm that knows me.

It's giving me more of what I want. And I link that to other kind of practices that prefigured something like that. you know, things like the mixtape where, you know, people who you did know you and who did love you would put together a mix of music to, you know, as a gift perhaps. And that was a form of kind of like technologically mediated social form that's now kind of been displaced by a computational curator that kind of knows you, not in the same way, but it does know. you because it's, you know, it got access to your data in a way that is, uh, is really kind of unprecedented historically. But your habits of consumption around listening, um, and listening, you know, to, uh, to, um, a playlist, you know, a mixtape, for example, um, prepared people for that and kind of prime the technology

for that. And that in turn was kind of primed by something like the lock men, um, which before that was prime by music boxes and other forms of musical automation where it used to be when we were listening to music, we had to be in the same room as someone. Maybe they were singing. Maybe they were playing the drums. But all of these, this kind of history, you know, starts us at these quite primeval moments where we're kind of gathered together as bodies. Maybe we're listening to each other, talking to each other, speaking, you know, speaking, writing, all of these things. And, Technologies kind of allow us to divorce those functions from our bodies and eventually kind of lay the scaffolding for all of these tools today.

What's, as we wrap up here, what is an example or two of a technology that just from your perspective has a very interesting story that people might not know or might not have considered? One story I love about the Walkman. So I got my first Walkman in the late 80s, but it was kind of, of prototyped in the late 70s by Sony. And it descended from actually a tape player. Apparently a version kind of went up into space around the Apollo missions. But when they were prototyping the Walkman, the Sony boss, Akio Morita, took a prototype home to his wife.

Well, he didn't take it home to his wife, but he was testing it at home. And his wife did not like it. She did not like how it cut him off from her. and that it kind of fostered to her this privacy divorced from this kind of social interaction that she wanted. So he added two elements to the Walkman, right, that were trying to mitigate that sense of privacy. And this kind of has everything to do with what we've been talking about. So those two pieces were kind of like an intercom button. So if you were listening to a Walkman, someone, maybe it's your mom, would come and press the button and that would turn on a mic on the outside of the Walkman and lower the music so that your mom could speak to you.

So like, hey, listen to me, it's time for dinner and could kind of cut through that private social world. And the other feature was the dual headphone jack so that you could listen, two people could listen together. You know, fast forward, those quickly fell away. People were not interested in that. So that kind of movement towards privacy ultimately won with the Walkman and kind of gets us to that, you know, private world. We're all just scrolling through our phones and not reaching out to other people. Well, this is great because, you know, we use technology all the time and yet we so seldom stop and think about the story behind how humans and technology came to be and how we got to. so reliant on it. And this was fun to do. I've been talking with Vanessa Chang and the name of

her book is The Body Digital, a brief history of humans and machines from Kuku clocks to chat cheap. There's a link to her book in the show notes. Vanessa, thank you so much. Great. Thank you so much. Great to talk to you. You know that brand new shirt you just bought? Well, you may not be the first person to wear it. Before it reached you, it may have been tried on by multiple shots. not to mention handled by factory workers, warehouse staff, and store employees. Microbiologists say that retail clothing can carry bacteria, fungi, and other microbes from all that human contact. But those germs aren't even your biggest concern. New clothes are often treated

with dyes and formaldehyde finishes and other chemicals to keep them wrinkle-free and looking crisp. Dermatologists say those residues are a common cause of skin irritation, especially for sensitive skin. The risk of serious illness is low, but new doesn't necessarily mean clean. So before you wear it, wash it. And that is something you should know. Sharing this podcast with someone else is, by far,

the best way to support this podcast and help keep it going. So please share this episode or any other episode or the whole, what if, 1,300 episodes with someone you know. I'm Mike Herruthers. Thanks for listening today to Something You Should Know.