Something You Should Know - How Great Innovators Think & Turning Anger Into Strength

Episode Date: August 18, 2025

UPGRADE TO SYSK PREMIUM! To unlock ad-free listening to over 1,000 episodes plus receive exclusive weekly bonus content, go to ⁠⁠⁠ https://SYSKPremium.com⁠ Try formulating an answer to a difficult question while looking someone in the eye. It is almost impossible. You must look away. Why is it so hard to concentrate while looking at someone? This episode starts with an explanation of that. http://www.livescience.com/7155-helps-concentration.html To be labeled as a great innovator is an honor. Innovators are held in high esteem. But what is it that makes them so special? What goes on in their heads that allows them to create innovative ideas? Here to delve deep into the minds of some of our greatest innovators is David Galenson. He is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago and author of the book Innovators (https://amzn.to/40ySzVN) Have you ever thought about where your anger comes from? When you get angry do you get aggressive, or do you use your anger to resolve the problem? If we let it get the best of us, anger can cause us to say or do things we regret, damage relationships or worse. There is a better way to deal with anger according to my guest, Sam Parker. He is a journalist who has written for publications including the Guardian, Telegraph, Observer and GQ magazine and he is author of a book called Good Anger: How Rethinking Rage Can Change Our Lives (https://amzn.to/4m3g4OS). In determining your premium, auto insurance companies factor in your address. But why should you pay more (or less) depending on where you live? Shouldn’t it be about how well and how much you drive? Listen as I explain the reasoning. https://www.alink2insurance.com/blog/how-location-impacts-car-insurance-premiums PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS!!! 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 INDEED: Get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Indeed.com/SOMETHING⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ right now! QUINCE: Keep it classic and cool with long lasting staples from Quince! Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Quince.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns! HERS: Whether you want to lose weight, grow thicker, fuller hair, or find relief for anxiety, Hers has you covered. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://forhers.com/something⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to get a personalized, affordable plan that gets you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Book club on Monday. Gym on Tuesday. Date night on Wednesday. Out on the town on Thursday. Quiet night in on Friday. It's good to have a routine. And it's good for your eyes too. Because with regular comprehensive eye exams at Specsavers,

you'll know just how healthy they are. Visit Spexsavers.cavers.cai to book your next eye exam. Eye exams provided by independent optometrists. Today on something you should know, why it's so hard to look someone in the eye when you're trying to come up with an answer to a question. Then understanding innovation and the innovators who create it. The conceptual innovator is like the little kid who's always got his hand up and he's waving, I know, I know, I know.

Conceptual innovators are very, very self-confident. Steve Jobs, he used this hyperbolic language, right? We're going to make a debt in the universe. Also, why do they use your address to determine how much your car insurance costs? And an important discussion about anger and help for those who struggle with it. I think what's happening actually is that we've been given lots of ways to express our anger, but very few ways to resolve it in a good way. Part of the problem is that we conflate anger with aggression and violence.

So we get lots of bad anger. We just don't get much of what I call good anger. All this today on Something You Should Know. Workday knows there are two kinds of people in business, backward thinkers and forward thinkers. And when you're a forward thinker, you need an AI platform that thinks like you do. Built to evolve with your organization,

Workday reimagines how you manage your people, money, and agents for long-term success. Bringing all your most valuable resources onto one powerful platform so you can add value even faster. Workday, moving business forever forward. 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.

When you're trying to answer a difficult question, where you look, where you focus your gaze, may have a lot to do with how, good your answer is. How can that be? Well, let's find out. Hi, and welcome to this episode of something you should know. When someone asks you a difficult question, it's sometimes hard to keep eye contact with them, and there's a reason for that. Not looking at someone can help you come up with a better answer. This is called gaze aversion, and adults do it 85% of the time. Children only do at about 40% of the time.

So, in a study, a group of children were trained to look away when contemplating a question, while others were not told to do anything. Then they were asked a series of questions. The students instructed to look away, answered 72% of the questions accurately, while the untrained group only answered the questions correctly 55% of the time. The difference between groups was especially evident the more difficult the questions were. The theory is that the human face is just too distracting. It's hard to look at someone in the eye and also come up with an answer to a question.

So perhaps we shouldn't try in the first place. And perhaps teachers need to understand that an averted gaze may just mean, I'm thinking. And that is something you should know. I just got an email from someone who is now an S-Y-S-K premium member who says he's loving it. When you're a premium member, you get all the something-you-should-know episodes ad-free, all of them. The previous ones, the current ones, the future ones, plus you get exclusive premium content for only $3.99 a month, and you pay even less when you get an annual subscription.

For details and to sign up, just go to S-Y-Sk Premium.com. That's sysk Premium.com. Boy, if there is one word you hear a lot today, it's innovation or innovator. If someone is labeled as an innovator, he or she is revered. I mean, that is a lofty label being named a true innovator. But what exactly is innovation? And who are these innovators that we admire so much? What's so special about them and what can we learn from them?

It's easy to think of innovators in the technology world, but actually every industry as well as the arts all have innovators. Here to help you better understand the world of innovation and the people in it is David Gallinson. He's a professor of economics at the University of Chicago and author of the book, Innovators. Hi, David, welcome to something you should know. Thank you very much. I appreciate the invitation. Well, I love this topic because innovation has become such a buzzword.

And if you're an innovator, I mean, that word just carries such cachet. What exactly, in your view, as somebody who studies this, what is an innovator and what is innovation? Well, it does have a cachet and it should. Economists make a distinction. We say an invention is doing something new. But an invention becomes an innovation when it diffuses. when it's adopted by other people. So an innovation is a useful invention. And so innovators, you know, innovators are significant people. And some examples of great innovators, just to

make sure people understand what we're talking about, would be just throw out some names. Who do you, who's in the Hall of Fame of Innovators in your view? Well, you know, the people I've been studying recently, I started with painters. Paul Seizan was the greatest artist of the 19th century, the most important, the most influential. Pablo Picasso was the most influential painter of the 20th century. Jackson Pollock was an enormously influential American painter. Andy Warhol, equally important. But they're painters.

When I think of innovators, I think of Steve Jobs or people who did, when you use the definition of, you know, something people use, well, I don't use Picasso. No, this is specific to a discipline. An innovator is somebody who changes the language of their discipline. And their discipline can be consumer technology, you know, like Steve Jobs, or it can be painting. Cézanne changed the way painters paint. Picasso changed the way enormous numbers of painters paint. And so you influence people in your discipline.

There are rare people who influence people beyond their discipline. For example, Picasso, I used to say that Picasso, was the most important painter of the 20th century. Now I say he's actually the most important artist because he influenced not only painters, but influenced poets and novelists and architects and even filmmakers. So his influence...

The thing about innovators is, obviously, they're influential people. The greater their influence, the greater their importance, right? The greater the importance of their inventions. When someone is considered an innovator because they change something and they create something

that other people adopt, are there just 18 million ways to get there? Or do these people have something in common? I discovered that they really do have something in common in terms of their procedures. Psychologists had studied creativity. And they tended to study it one discipline at a time. And they argue that poets innovate in a certain way, novelists innovate in a certain way. And my question started with life cycles. I mean, I'm an economist, right? And economists are interested in how people function over the course of the life cycle. So the question I really started with is, when in their lives are innovators most creative and why?

And I discovered that unlike the psychologists, it was important to recognize that creativity is not monolithic. Poets don't all work alike. Novelists don't all work alike. There are two very different kinds of creativity, each with a very different, distinct pattern of discovery over the life cycle. And those two ways are? I call one group conceptual innovators.

These are the young geniuses. You know, you wanted examples of innovators. Albert Einstein, Orson Wells, Sylvia Plath, Andy Warhol, Bob Dylan, Steve Jobs, Miles Davis. But then, on the other hand, there are the people I call experimental innovators. Experimental because the first definition of experimental in the Oxford English Dictionary is trial and error. These are the old masters. These are people who mature much more slowly. Paul Seizan, Charles Darwin, Virginia Woolf, Robert Frost, Alfred Hitchcock, John Coltrane, Warren Buffett.

And the way they get to where they're going, you say that in these two different disciplines, is similar? All the people in those two groups kind of get there in the same way? Yes. I hear the surprise in your voice, and the answer is yes. Let me tell you the general characteristics of each of these groups. Conceptual innovators determine the purpose of their work before they begin to make it. So typically, they plan their works carefully, then they execute them systematically. Conceptual painters make very careful preparatory drawings and studies before they begin to paint.

In contrast, the experimentalists are people who want to portray the real world. They privilege observation and description, an understanding of reality. They're often more concerned with process than with products. They are people, they consider themselves seekers. They want to make discoveries in the course of creating their work. So they have goals, but the goals are very vague. But doesn't a big part of being an innovator mean that you succeeded? because, and what I mean is, so for example, it's easy for me to imagine that somewhere on in Picasso's career, when he first emerged, people could have said, that is the strangest thing I've ever seen. What a piece of crap. And we never hear from him again. So would he have still been an innovator? He still painted a Picasso, but success seemed to have been a big ingredient.

influence is the key. So when Picasso invented cubism, completely new style of art, the critics did say that's the biggest piece of crap I've ever seen, but other painters responded to it. They adopted it in enormous numbers. And it became the new language of painting in the 20th century. Same thing with Andy Warhol. Andy Warhol began silk screening paintings, and the critics not only said, that's bad art. They said, that's not art at all.

Art depends on the touch of the artist, but other painters. began using photographs and mechanical reproduction. And so, you know, it's influence that determines the importance of an innovation. If Picasso, if Cubism had not influenced other painters, you never would have heard of Picasso, but he had enormous impact on other painters. So we hear stories and legends of great innovators, and you've talked about several. And they're often depicted as go-it-alone kind of guys, that they did this all themselves. And then you hear things like, well, you know, great innovation is the result of collaboration.

So what do you say? Throughout most of our history, individuals have made the key breakthroughs. So for example, you know, Picasso had teachers. His father was an artist and taught him art. But Picasso's work was distinctive. And that tends to be the case that, again, everybody in any discipline has teachers and they virtually all have colleagues. but in most cases it's individuals who make the breakthroughs if in some you know some of the

breakthroughs are genuinely jointly made and then you know there may be two or three people who share in an innovation when a conceptual innovator comes up with a new idea is there any sense of where does the idea come from is it just poof generated out of nothing or is it a way of looking at the world that you find, like, what's the, what's the path? The conceptualists innovate by combining existing ideas. They create new ideas, but in almost every case, they're combinations of existing ideas that were never previously associated with each other. So they create these surprising synthesis of earlier art or of earlier science, for example,

in Einstein's case. and these are radical leaps. Other people are amazed at them. They say nobody ever would have thought of combining those things. Can you give me an example of that of taking two things and coming up with something innovative?

The Walkman was very popular. You remember, you're old enough to remember a Walkman, right? Yep. I think I still have one. Let's combine a computer with a Walkman and he created an iPod. Now, he was so successful that the Walkman no longer exists.

But those are two things that nobody had ever thought to combine. Well, and that brings up a really interesting question because, yes, he thought of it, but he didn't actually do it. So is he still an innovator? And that's what I want to ask you next. I'm talking to David Gallinson. He's author of the book, Innovators. This episode is brought to you by Square.

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That moment right there. That moment right there, that's what it feels like to step into a bureau booth. Our soundproof office pods bring deep focus to even the loudest offices. In the bureau booth, no construction, no distractions, just clarity. Search bureau office booths or visit withbure.com. So, David, Steve Jobs came up with the idea for the iPod. But here's the thing that I really want to get your comment on. But it wasn't Steve Jobs who went into the lab and sat there every night trying to make an iPod. He hired people to do it.

He could no more make an iPod than you could. So is he an innovator or is he just a good manager? No, there's a very interesting point. You know, I was struck. When Steve Jobs died, I was home. I was feeling well I was watching television. They cut into CNN and they announced his death. And then immediately had a talking head.

It was a pretty authoritative guy. I think it might have been Ken O'Leod, the New Yorker. And he said, Steve Jobs was the greatest inventor of his generation. He was the Thomas Edison of his time. But other people objected violently, basically in the way you're saying, they said, look, Steve Jobs didn't invent the personal computer or the iPod. other people did. And we could debate for a long time. And there's no obvious solution to whether Steve Jobs invented those things. But at the very beginning of Steve Jobs' career, he was working

with Steve Wozniak. And Wozniak created the guts of a personal computer. And Steve Wozniak was just going to give away. It wasn't a full personal computer. You really had to be a kind of a tech nerd to make it work with a screen and everything. But he was just going to give it away. And Steve Jobs said, no, we can make money selling these things. And that was the Apple One. Now, that was not a complete personal computer. But Steve Jobs kept pushing Steve Wozniak. Wozniak was a technical genius, but he had no, he didn't have much drive.

And so Jobs insisted that Wozniak make it into a form where a non-nerd could simply sit down, type on a keyboard, and see the words appear on a screen. Steve Wozniak was the first person who ever did that were typed on a keyboard and saw the letters appear on the screen in front of them. That was the Apple 2. Now, when Wozniak invented the Apple 2, they realized that this was going to make a lot of money. And they were going, so they decided to incorporate Apple. So they wrote up an agreement where Wozniak and Jobs each were to have 45% of Apple. And then there was an executive who was going to be the kind of the CEO and he was going to have the other 10%. Steve Jobs took this agreement over to Wozniak's house.

Steve Wozniak's father was an engineer, and he saw the agreement and he said, my son's not going to sign this agreement. This is nonsense. He said to Steve Jobs, you didn't invent anything. My son did. And Steve Jobs started crying, which it turns out is what he did when he was confronted by adversity. But Steve Wozniak said, no, no, no, dad, I'm going to sign this agreement. And Wozniak explained that, yes, he had done all of the technical work.

But Jobs was the one who had the idea of doing it, and Jobs was the one who was going to sell it. So, you know, we could debate for a long time philosophically whether Steve Jobs invented the personal computer or Wozniak did. Wozniak is actually in the inventor Hall of Fame for having invented the personal computer. But Steve Jobs is the person who's associated with creating the personal computer because it was his idea. right and that same thing with the iPod or the iPhone he had an idea and then he hired people who could make it and he supervised them so it's an interesting point but this is conceptual innovation conceptual innovation is consists largely of having a novel idea and Steve Jobs said that you know when you ask innovators about their work very often they feel kind of guilty because

they didn't really do anything, they just saw something. But in most cases, it's seeing that thing that's the key. Once Steve Jobs saw that you could make an iPod or an iPhone, then engineers could get together and work out how to do it. But somebody had to think of doing it. And so he is entitled to his label as an innovator. We can argue about that, but yeah, I think he's one. widely regarded as an innovator. There are still some people who say, no, he's not an innovator. They make the case that you made a few minutes ago. And so why didn't Steve Wozniak hang around? I mean, he's an inventor. He invented the

personal computer, and he had all that Apple stock, but he's no longer and hasn't been with Apple for some time. No, I mean, the interesting thing is that Wozniak invented the personal computer. I think he was 24 years old. And he, had 45% of Apple when it, you know, when it was incorporated, but he didn't like being a, you know, an executive and he left the company very soon. He never made another innovation in his life. Whereas Steve Jobs went on and was identified with the creation of all of these other eyes, the iPod, the iPad, the IMac, and so on. So do conceptual innovators have, or describe that they have an aha moment? Like, it just,

all of a sudden, boom, there it is? Or it, even though it's relatively quick, it's not that quick. Or do they, they have an aha moment? Well, the conceptual ones do. I mean, sort of the traditional characterization, the caricaturing of innovation is, you know, a guy with a light bulb going on over his head. And there's that moment, the eureka moment. And so there's a moment when Jobs said, we can put the Apple One in a fancy case with a screen and we can sell it as the Apple 2. And that's simply, you know, that's what he said, I didn't do anything. I just saw something. And that's a moment.

Making the thing, you know, takes time. But the key there was the idea just saying we could do this. We can do something that nobody's ever thought of doing. So when great innovators innovate, when they go public with their new innovation, you know, here's the new computer, here's the new, whatever it is, how in that moment are they typically viewed as crazy or, I mean, what do people generally think right away? Radical is the term that's very often used to describe these conceptual innovators, you know, whether it's Miles Davis changing radically from one style of jazz to another. Sylvia Plath creating a new kind of poetry. Orson Wells making a new kind of movie with Citizen Kane, radical, conspicuous, sudden, dramatic.

But I wonder how deliberate it is. In other words, the radical reaction, oh, that's radical. That's the reaction. But from the innovator point of view, did they set out to be radical? Or did they just, yeah, let's try this? And then the reaction was, wow, that's amazing. But it was just, yeah, something. to try. The conceptual innovator is like the little kid who's always got his hand up and he's waving,

I know, I know, I know. Conceptual innovators are very, very self-confident, arrogant. They say, I'm a revolutionary. Steve Jobs would, you know, he used this hyperbolic language, right? We're going to make it a dent in the universe. The computer is the most important invention that's ever been invented. And I always thought, well, gee, you know, I thought fire was kind of a big deal. You know, Sylvia Plath, when she was writing her October poems, she was only moderately known, her husband was a better, better known poet than she was, but she was writing, she wrote her great poems within a single month. And after she wrote her poem, Daddy, she wrote to her mother and she said, I am a genius of a poet. I am writing the greatest poems of my life, they will make

my name. When Scott Fitzgerald finished writing the Great Gatsby at the end, age of 28. He knew it was a great book. He wrote to his editor and he said, I have just written the greatest novel ever written by an American. So these are people who live in a world of black and white. They don't think they've done something great. They know it. And they tell you. Well, I obviously have not studied innovation the way you have, but from my casual observation, it has always seemed to me that great innovators innovate once. Like they come up with this great new thing. but they seldom come up with another great new thing that's just as revolutionary as the first new thing.

Like you get one bite at the apple and that's about it. Is that true or just my perception? The potential danger for these conceptual innovators is they change the world when they're 25, but then they become captives of their own innovation and they just repeat that over and over for the rest of their lives. Now, Picasso is not a good example of that, actually,

because he was one of the great serial innovators of the 20th century. Picasso invented Cubism when he was 25, a completely due style of art that was enormously influential. Five years later, he made the first collage. He put a piece of oil cloth on a canvas. Now, to you, that may not sound like a big deal, but since the Renaissance, there had been a tradition, a convention and painting that only paint could be placed on the surface of a canvas. Picasso broke that. And again, it's difficult to understand how big a change that was in those days, right?

These are people who they didn't have an internet. They didn't have movies. They didn't have television. Art was one of the most important activities for the most sophisticated people. And these people knew the tradition. They knew hundreds of years of art history. And this was a shocking innovation. It shocked other artists.

Young artists responded to it immediately. and began making paintings with things other than simply paint. And they called it collage. It was a new genre. So that's a second, it's a completely separate innovation. Two years later, he made another radical innovation. Picasso, at the age of about 32, began alternating styles. He made paintings one day that were cubist, the next day that were traditional.

No artists had ever done that. Again, it was shocking to his elders, but his peers embraced the idea. Marcel Duchamp, another important painter of that era, said this is the most important thing that Picasso has ever contributed to art, the idea that we can be free. Well, this has been a great tour into the mind of innovators, and I think given all of us a better understanding of how innovation works. I've been talking with David Gallinson. He is a professor of economics at the University of Chicago and author of the book, Innovators. There's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. David, thank you.

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Grim, Grimmer, or Grimmist, so you, your child, your family can choose the episode that's the right level of scary for you. Tune in to Grim, Grimmer, Grimmist, and our new season, available now. So I'll confess that when I first heard about my guest for this segment and the topic he discusses, which is anger, I thought, yeah, been there. We've done that a few times. How much more is there to learn about anger? But when you hear this next conversation, I think you'll come away thinking differently about your anger and the anger of other people. After all, we all get angry. It's what we do with that anger that really matters. Sam Parker is a journalist who has

written for publications including The Guardian, Telegraph, Observer, and GQ Magazine. And he's author of a book called Good Anger, How Rethinking Rage Can Change Our Lives. Hi, Sam, welcome to something you should know. Hey, Mike, thanks for having me. So I hear people say that, you know, we live in a very angry world, that the world is getting nastier and angrier. Is that true? Do you think we're angrier than we used to be? Or is that perception? No, I think it's correct. I think what's happening actually is that we've been given lots of ways to express our anger, but very few ways to resolve it in a good way. So a lot of the modern ills get blamed on social media and I'm afraid I'm going to do a little bit of that again. We've been handed this incredible tool for venting what we're upset about. But unfortunately, that very tool stymies any opportunity to have a constructive conversation with anyone. So we get lots of bad anger. We just don't get much of what I call good anger. I just love what you just. said i've never thought of it that way but we have so many ways to express our anger and so few ways to resolve it that you've just we don't even have to do the interview now we're done that was brilliant

that's a brilliant quote it's a brilliant quote thank you something i studied uh was the conditions under which according to psychology uh an expression of anger can be truly cathartic that we can truly feel that it is done as good. And often anger is a very social emotion. So if I made you angry and you came to me and told me that and we talked through why it was and I shared my perspective and we came to a more empathic understanding of each other and we agreed on a way forward that was defined by mutual respect, that's a fantastic use of anger. What you see on Twitter and, you know, Facebook and everywhere else where we go now to rant is that people never really get to have that conversation. And actually, if those platforms were to enable that, we'd spend less time on them.

So it's not on their interest at all. They just want us to be stuck in the kind of fog of our initial rage, never really able to, you know, get to a happy place with it. And I think this is part of the reason why the world feels very angry at the moment is that we have a lot of anger ventilation and very little anger resolution. But social media aside, we have the same problem in real life. If what you just said is true that the way to resolve anger in a positive way is the process that you just described, well, who does that in real life either? I mean, people, you know, give the silent treatment or they, you know, and don't say anything, or they blow up or, but they don't do what you just said. Well, some people do, but yes, it's very difficult. And I think this is the skill that we need to learn.

Part of the problem is that we conflate anger with aggression and violence. You know, one is a healthy emotion that has lots of useful information for us. It can be incredibly energizing in a positive way. The other is a behavioral choice that we make that normally makes things worse. And what I'm interested in most of all is what I call the other anger problem, which is not actually the people who can't stop losing their temporal getting into confrontations, but it's the people who suppress their anger, who often don't even know it's there, right? It's the people pleases. It's the conflict avoiders. it's the people who keep the peace often at the expense of their own.

And something I realized in my own sort of journey was that this was really something that sat behind why I felt anxious. And the role of an inability to express anger healthily in depression and anxiety is something that we don't talk about enough. And lots of people out there are very good socially. They don't cause problems for anyone else. But because they don't honor their anger, they have no way of expressing it. They can't really identify it.

they're paying a personal price for it on the inside. And I think this is something that we need to start to talk about. Let's start talking about it. Do you think people don't express their anger because they don't know they're angry or they just know it and stuff it in? It's a combination. Some people do a mixture of the two. There are many reasons historically, socially why lots of people feel feelings of shame, taboo sort of fear around anger. We often learn as children that if we display our anger, we will be punished or rejected for it. Certain groups in society are really punished for expressing anger in an excessive way. And so we have lots of barriers when it comes to expressing anger in the first place. Other people, yeah, you know, they do repress it. They

sort of suppress it. And they do that, I think, out of fear a lot of the time. And this leads to, as I say, it's something that sits often behind depression and anxiety. But it is something that we can unlearn. So help me unlearn it. How do you then come out the other side and be able to express your anger? And, you know, I don't want to be hanging around people who are constantly expressing their anger. Like, okay, shut up. You know, enough's enough. Yeah, we know yesterday you were angry about something else and now you're angry about this.

It's how they express it, though, right? I mean, if somebody is coming at you and they're being very kind of dogmatic or domineering with their anger, they've kind of allowed aggression to overtake them a little bit. That's not pleasant to be around, but if someone is coming to you and saying, hey, look, you know, this incident made me, this incident made me angry the other day and, you know, this is why I think it is and I wonder if we could resolve it this way. No, you don't want to be having that conversation every day. But imagine if we just had that conversation occasionally at work. Instead of going and stewing in what we're upset about or complaining about a person behind their back, you know, there's, there's so many ways that we're inefficient with our time because we're not really talking about the fact that we're angry. So I agree. you. I think, you know, you don't want to be spending all day talking about anger. But actually a conversation about anger can be positive, it can be calm, it can be constructive. And if we did that, we'd actually save ourselves a lot of strife. But in life, a lot of times anger comes up when things are not calm. You call me a jerk and I get upset and angry and yell something back

at you. I'm not going to come back to you two days later and go, well, you know, Sam, the other day, I'll probably explode in the moment and say, oh, yeah, you can't call me a jerk. But I mean, that's how people deal with that. Well, you know, I've learned to deal with it differently. And I think that you can take a beat with anger. And part of it is asking yourself the question of like what the anger has to tell you. What we're very good at is understanding the information anger has about other people. So we're great at going, okay, Mike's made me angry. He must be a jerk. But if you then actually learn to ask yourself the next question, what is the anger telling me about myself? What is it pointing me towards? What is it

signaling? Then you get to more useful information and then you can act on it more calmly. And actually, the energy of anger can hang around for a very long time. I mean, I don't know about you, but, you know, something really gets to me. I will still be annoyed about it two days later, three days later, a week later. But when you come at it with a little bit of calmness, a little bit of clarity, you can then choose which way to direct that energy. This is a silly example, but I use it from time to time. You know, if my partner and I, I have an argument and I'm initially, you know, full of frustration at how she's misunderstood me or how I've been unfairly treet. What I'll sometimes do after we've had an argument and we're cooling off is take the energy of that anger and I will go and clean the kitchen cleaner than it's ever been cleaned.

And the reason I'm doing that is because I want to show her what a great person I am and how she was wrong to ever doubt me. Now, that's just re-funneling the energy of anger into something constructive. what I might have done in the past or what a lot of people do is perpetuate the argument for longer or storm out of the house or, you know, go and kick a wall or something. When you start to see anger as a choice,

you can take the information and you can take the energy of it and you can put it to good use. Yeah, but what you just said, though, was you had an argument. So that's where I think things go off the rails is in that argument that I thought you didn't have

that I thought you walked away and came back two days later. But there's nothing wrong with having an argument. You know, when an argument becomes unhealthy is when it becomes toxic, excessive. You become aggressive with each other. You start flinging insults around. You know, we all know what a bad argument looks like. But a good argument is actually a really healthy part of a relationship. In fact, if you have a relationship in which there is no argument and both parties are too afraid to show when they're angry and

upset, that's unhealthy in its own way. It's a terribly tense thing to be around. It's not a great environment for children often, you know. So you do have to feel. that middle ground and having a little bit of an argument is is not a bad thing. It's just when we let it get out of control. So walk me through a good argument. Okay. So my partner and I have made each other angry or one person has made the other angry. Sometimes what we do is use the discomfort caveat, which is a principle of admitting up front that you're feeling angry, which kind of sets a more, let's say, empathic sort of tone between you from the beginning. It makes you feel like you're on the same side a little bit more.

But you have the argument. You talk about what you're upset about. And then you agree to a timeout. You know, you take a little bit of a break. And then you both go and reflect on it and you come back after a certain amount of time and talk again. Physiologically, they say that 20 minutes is the right. Is it the minimum time for this?

That's how long it takes for your nervous system to reset for the amygdala hijack that took place to calm down again. In that time, by the way, you shouldn't just rehearse what you're going to say when you get to get you know go back into the argument you should go and distract yourself with a book or a walk or a podcast or something then come back and have the conversation and the crucial thing is to think about what has the anger alerted you to other than the mistake of the other person like that needs addressed that shouldn't be forgotten but what is the unmet need that it's pointing you towards what is the sort of wound from the past that it's prodded you know what is it

in you that has been made to feel insecure or upset or you know afraid these are difficult questions to ask ourselves but when you get used to it you start to see that the reason we get angry is because we're being told by our psyche that we need to make a change and often that change is not the most obvious one it's not just that person needs to apologize it's something else maybe as well okay so i got a bunch of question your description of an argument resembles nothing like my description of what an argument looks like it There was no arguing. Well, there was an argument in the beginning when you're sharing what it is that you're, you know, the one person's upset about. But, no, there was sharing. There wasn't arguing. I mean, maybe there are two words for the same thing. But your version is so tame and thoughtful and, and like there's a plan rather than just saying what comes ever, ever comes out of your mouth because you're angry.

that's an argument right and you can do that part but we all know the difference between an argument that stayed within the parameters of let's say a certain amount of reasonableness right and we know the difference between that and an argument that is escalated into something else when you really have lost your head right there are very two different types of exchanges and I think you can you can have the first version and you can have a cross word that's just a natural normal part of being in an adult relationship but you can then choose to break away and reflect on it properly and come back. Another really good thing you can do in a relationship is talk about anger when you're not angry, you know, talk about what your triggers are

with each other, talk about why you think they may exist, talk about previous arguments that you've had, and you start to map out with each other a little bit, you know, what it is that really winds each other up about each other. And I think if you have that when you're in a place of calm, you're taking a little bit of an insurance policy out against your next argument. It means you can get to the resolution bit quicker, not saying you don't sometimes still lose your head. But, you know, it's all about giving yourself information and giving yourself a map as to like why it is you get angry

and how you can come back from it. But when you or someone in the argument loses their head, or if an argument begins with who the hell do you think you are, it's not going well from the very beginning. how do you calm down when things start to get out of hand? Well, like I say, I mean, you do have to take a physical break. You do have to give your, you have to remember, like anger is a physiological response, right? We have a hijacking of our brain.

We're flooded with adrenaline. We all know the physical symptoms of a moment of rage. It can be very uncomfortable. You have to give your body time to reset. And with that, your mind and your hours of rationalization. and, you know, coherent argument building and all the rest of it. So you take yourself away and you give yourself some time for that reset to happen. But then the piece that people don't often do is then really be honest with yourself

and really be inquisitive about why you got angry and what that's pointing you towards. And what is the information for me about me and not just the other person. So I know people, I bet you know people who almost or who seem to almost never get angry. Yes. Who are those people? I actually think they are more of us than you might think. And something I heard a lot when I was researching my book was people say to me, I don't really get angry. I'm not really an angry person. One in particular sticks out to me, who's a very celebrated novelist in the UK.

I was having a conversation with him and he was talking about talking to his therapist and describing a sort of uncomfortable feeling he gets around certain people in certain situations. And his therapist said to him, you realize you're describing anger. And this was like a eureka moment for this guy. He was in his 30s. He'd never even, he would have told you he was not an angry person. What was really happening was that it was manifesting as a sort of anxiety. And this is when we get into the way that many people, because they've learned that anger is something they shouldn't express or that it isn't safe for them to, they develop another emotional response in its place. A lot of women will tell you that they cry when they get angry.

you know sadness is what comes out personally for me it's it's more anxiety if i'm angry about something it can manifest as anxiety um so there are lots of people who have this kind of um dysfunctional relationship with anger where they don't they don't know that it's actually anger that they're feeling and this is part of the problem um so you kind of have to learn like how do you identify how how do you know when you're feeling angry when you don't think you are because the truth is that nobody can live without anger. There's no life without it. I think you said that at the top of the conversation and that's absolutely right. But lots of people will tell you that they live without it or that they never get angry. If they said that about any of the core emotion, you'd probably

think, hmm, that sounds a little unrealistic or unlikely. When people say it about anger, we think, oh, they must just be chill, you know, they're enlightened somehow or they're, you know, they're kind of, they're above anger or something. It's nonsense. So given all you've said over the last several minutes. Let's recap a little bit here about what people can do with their anger that perhaps they've never done before. The first thing you need to do is redefine what anger is to yourself. You need to separate it from ideas of aggression and violence. You need to reconceptualize it as a healthy emotion that has information for you and energy that you can use. Then you need to figure out what's my personal relationship with anger. If it's not direct and healthy, which for a lot of people

it isn't. What do I do instead of feeling angry? Like, what are my, what are my responses that kind of cover the anger up? And also, what happens to my body when I feel angry? I learned that teeth grinding, which is something I used to do, you know, all through the night, was actually a lot to do with holding onto anger. So it can manifest itself in the body. Sometimes the body knows something that the mind hasn't caught up with yet. So start to understand your personal set of signals and responses to anger when it comes along. Then it's about when, when you're you recognize that you're feeling angry about something or you're angry with somebody, not acting in the moment as best you can, taking it away and analyzing it from every angle.

So not just what does it say about the other person? What does it say about me? What are the unmet needs that it's pointing me towards? Then it's about deciding what do I do with this. Sometimes it's about going and having a direct conversation with someone when you feel calm enough. It's about having the bravery which comes with practice of saying, you made me angry, I need to talk to you about why. That can lead you to a constructive conversation. Sometimes for whatever reason, that just isn't feasible or it doesn't seem the right

thing to do. Then the question is, well, what do I do with this energy that I've still got on my body because I'm angry? Let's channel it into something productive. Let's channel it into doing something that gets me ahead. Then you've made a choice about your anger that actually improves your life rather than making it worse. How hard is this? I mean, I guess it depends on where you are on the scale. But, but I mean, is this, is this something if you put your mind to it, you can just do it? Or is this something that takes a lot of practice and you're going to get it wrong? I think a really good metaphor for this is trying to use anger when you never really have. It's a bit like trying to drive a sports car when you don't have a license. You are going

to bang into things. You are going to stall. You're going to get it wrong a bunch of times. It's really difficult. It's kind of like emotional ninja stuff, I think. Um, you're You need to give yourself the grace to slowly get better at it. You need to be up front with other people and explain to them that you're trying to get better to act on your anger and, hey, you might get it wrong here and there. It's all about being open and curious about it. But I personally have been on this path for the best part of the last 10 years. I'm by no means expert at it.

But my life has improved immeasurably, both my mental health, the trajectory of my career, my personal relationships. all of it has been improved by practicing and learning to get better at acting when I'm angry in the right way. Well, anger is certainly a topic we all have to deal with. We all know people or are people who have anger issues. And clearly you've mastered it. You seem to have figured out how to deal with anger. And so can we all.

I've been talking with Sam Parker. He is a journalist and author of the book Good Anger, how rethinking rage can change our lives. There's a link to his book at Amazon in the show notes. Sam, thanks. Thanks for being here. Thanks, Mike. I've really enjoyed the conversation.

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