Something You Should Know - Is Marriage Dying? & How Top Performers Build Confidence

Episode Date: June 22, 2026

Most people have heard of the "dark web," but what exactly is it? Is it really a hidden corner of the internet where criminals and bad actors operate beyond the reach of law enforcement? And what about the "deep web"—is that the same thing? These terms are often used interchangeably, but they mean very different things. Understanding the difference offers a fascinating glimpse into how the internet really works. https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/news/what-dark-web You often hear that fewer people are getting married, that younger generations have lost interest in marriage, or that marriage itself is slowly fading away. The reality is much more interesting. Marriage is not disappearing—it is evolving. People are marrying later, expecting different things from marriage than previous generations did, and redefining what a successful marriage looks like. At the same time, marriage remains one of the most important relationships in people's lives. So what is changing, what isn't, and what does the future of marriage look like? For some answers we turn to Stephanie Coontz, Director of Research and Public Education for the Council on Contemporary Families and author of For Better and Worse: The Complicated Past and Challenging Future of Marriage (https://amzn.to/440TQpK). We've all seen people who seem to possess an extraordinary level of confidence. Elite athletes, military leaders, top executives, first responders—people who perform under enormous pressure yet appear calm, focused, and absolutely certain they can handle whatever comes next. According to Dr. Nate Zinsser, the kind of confidence is a skill that can be deliberately built, strengthened, and maintained. Drawing on decades of experience training soldiers, athletes, executives, and emergency personnel, Dr. Zinsser explains where genuine confidence comes from, and how anyone can develop the mental habits that lead to stronger performance under pressure. Dr. Zinsser is Director of the Performance Psychology Program at West Point and author of The Confident Mind: A Battle-Tested Guide to Unshakable Performance (https://amzn.to/4xAOwqS) Most dog owners believe a hug is a universal sign of affection. Your dog may not agree. While dogs are often expressive about their emotions, humans frequently misread what those emotions mean. Understanding how dogs communicate—and how they interpret our behavior—can help prevent misunderstandings that sometimes lead to stress, anxiety, or even aggression. Source: Stanley Coren, author of How to Speak Dog (https://amzn.to/4e07aAL). PLEASE SUPPORT OUR SPONSORS POCKET HOSE: For a limited time, when you purchase a new Pocket Hose Ballistic, you'll get a FREE 360 degree rotating pocket pivot and a FREE thumb drive nozzle! Just text SYSK to 64000 AIR DOCTOR: Head to ⁠https://AirDoctorPro.com⁠ and use promo code SYSK to get $250 off select AirDoctor air purifiers, including the 3500, 4000, and 5500 models. Plus, you’ll receive a free 3year warranty!  RULA: Thousands of people are already using Rula to get affordable, high-quality therapy that’s actually covered by insurance. Visit ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Rula.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ to get started. QUINCE: Elevate your summer wardrobe. Go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Quince.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ for free shipping on your order and 365-day returns. Now available in Canada, too! SHOPIFY: It's time to turn those "what ifs" into CHA CHING with Shopify Today! Sign up for your $1 per month trail and start selling today at ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://Shopify.com/sysk⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today, on something you should know, what's the dark web or the deep web? And who's using it? Can you use it? Then is marriage dying? Apparently not, but it is changing. Let's put it this way. Few of than 10% of people say they don't want to get married. But what you have increasingly is quite a number of people who say they've no idea if they actually will get married.

Also, you may likely be misreading your... dog's emotions and one of the world's leading experts on how to build and maintain an unshakable belief in your abilities the idea is to cultivate a sense of certainty about your ability that allows you to bypass or ignore a lot of conscious analytical thought and simply execute almost unconsciously all this today on something you should know 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. You've probably heard of the dark web or the deep web, but do you really know

what those terms mean? I didn't. So that's what we're going to start this episode of something you should know with. So when you hear the term the dark web, it sounds like some sinister underground version of the internet, where criminals are buying and selling illegal things. And while some of that does happen, the reality is a lot more interesting. First, the dark web is not the same thing as the deep web, even though people often use the terms interchangeably. The deep web is simply all of the online content that search engines don't index. Your email inbox, online bank accounts, medical records, subscription content, and company databases are all part of the deep web. In fact, most of the internet is deep web content. The dark web

is a much smaller piece of it. It consists of websites that require special software, most commonly a browser called Tor, to access. Torr roots internet traffic through multiple computers around the world to make it much harder to identify who is visiting a site and who is operating it. That anonymity attracts criminals, but it also attracts journalists, political dissidents, whistleblowers, and ordinary people who simply value privacy. In countries where governments censor the Internet or monitor citizens, the dark web can provide one of the few ways to communicate freely. So despite its spooky reputation, the dark web isn't inherently illegal, it's really

just a privacy tool. What matters is what people do with it. And that is something you should know. Marriage seems to have an image problem these days. Fewer people are getting married. Many are waiting until much later in life. Birth rates are falling, and more people are choosing to remain single altogether.

If you listen to some commentators, marriage is becoming obsolete, a relic from another era that is slowly disappearing. But is that really what's happening? Has marriage lost its relevance? or is it simply evolving into something different than it used to be? Joining me to sort out the myths, the realities, and what the future may hold is Stephanie Kuntz. She is Director of Research and Public Education for the Council on Contemporary Families.

She's written extensively for publications including the New York Times, CNN, and the Wall Street Journal, and she's author of a book called For Better and Worse, The Complicated Past and Challenging Future of Marriage. Hi, Stephanie. Welcome to something you should know. Thank you, Mike. So despite what you hear people say, what is the state of marriage today? Is it going the way of the dinosaur? Is marriage dead? Is marriage very much alive? What is it?

Certainly, marriage is not dead. Yes. Back in the 1950s, more people married. 94% of them married before they reached their 35th birthday. Only five percent. of them never married at all. The average age of marriage was under 21 for a woman and under 23 for a boy. So when you look at what's happening to now, you still get 85% of Americans half went at some point, but that's not until they reach their 50s and 60s. So of course it looks like marriage is collapsing if you just say how many, you know, what's the rate of marriage per single people in the population? So I don't think marriage is collapsing. It's obviously more voluntary than it used to be. Divorce rates have been falling since 1980, since they hit their high point in 1980, but they're not going to disappear.

What's interesting to me, though, is that for all the talk about marriage being obsolete, most people still believe it is the most rigorous, highest commitment that they can enter into. parents whose kids marry respect them more than if the kids are living together and that goes for the parents of same-sex couples and heterosexual couples. Most people still say they want to marry. Only 8 to 10% say they definitely do not want to marry. But what we have seen that's interesting

is a big increase in the number of people who say, well, I don't know if I actually will get married even though I might like to. And that increase has been. been the greatest among young women. That's a real turn because it used to be that men were the ones who were saying, well, I don't know if I'll get married. You had said that 80-something percent of people still say they want to get married, but how does that break down by gender? Let's put it this way. Few of than 10 percent of people say they don't want to get married. But what you have

increasingly is quite a number of people who say they've no idea if they actually will get married. And what's interesting to me is that that also goes along with a lot fewer people are saying that they are absolutely confident they would be a good spouse. So I think what's going on here is we have much higher expectations of marriage and people are not entirely sure that they're going to be able to make them. And one big reversal in history is that it's now women who are less certain that they will actually end up married, even though they don't necessarily want to stay single. They're much more likely than boys now to say, well, I have no idea if I'll actually end up married. And I think that's in large part because that women's expectations of marriage

and their relationships to men are changing faster than men's relationships with women and their expectations of themselves and of women. So how in this discussion, because a big part of marriage is parenting. How much is the desire to be a parent tied up in this desire or not desire to get married? Well, that's a very interesting question because both young men and young women tend to want to have children, but young men want it much more than young women. And I think, again, it's not because women don't necessarily want them, but because they have higher expectations of sharing the work of child care and the joys of child care. So they are looking around at what's been happening to their parents and other people in the

society and they are saying, I would love a marriage if it really involves a man who's going to completely share child raising with me. But if not, I can do without. And some are saying, well, I can do it alone. But many are saying, well, I can do it alone. But many are saying, well, I just don't need to have children if it's just going to be the kind of hassle that I hear it is with so many older women complaining and leaving their husbands. That really surprises me and a lot of other people listening, I think, that women are less likely to want to have children than men are, just because my sense is that the maternal instinct is stronger than the paternal instinct. But, you know, I don't know why I think that,

but I do think that. Well, I don't deny that there are instincts, but I think so much is socially embedded in us. And I think that men and women both have the potential to want to be with babies. And it has remarkable effects that we can talk about at some point, caring for babies actively, not just looking on while your wife changes diapers,

has tremendous effects on men's hormones and their emotions. But I think the reason women are having trouble with it is because they are now expecting to play a role in the outside world much greater than we have been assigned for the past 200, 300 years. And so if they're going to play an equal role in the outside world, they're expecting that they want help and equal help in the inside world and with kids.

And so a lot of the young people I talk, to a lot of my students over the years have said to me, yes, I want kids. And when they find a guy who wants them to and who they think is really going to step up to the plate, they tend to have them. But they also tend to wait and see how the relationship is going. They watch other people whose relationships founder.

And in fact, having children, which used to be bragged about bringing parents closer is now, it triggers a lot of extra conflicts in a marriage. And so when they see that, they begin to say, well, maybe not, maybe not. When women say that, you know, now that I'm required to do more outside the house, I have a job and everything else, so I want a man who's going to share in the responsibility, in that conversation, are women saying that they would rather not have more responsibility outside the house and they would be content to be a wife and a mom, or they like having the responsibility outside the house, they just want more help inside the house?

There's a lot of variability in that. And of course, we're hearing a lot now from people who think that it's just too much trouble to get the men to help them out. But what I see most frequently and read about in terms of people's complaints about marriage is that women really do want, they have the same sort of aspirations to develop themselves and their talents as men have always been encouraged to have. And when a child comes, they really want to dig in and help that child, but they really want more of their father to. And unfortunately, because of all the years that we have organized families differently, it's very hard for men to learn to do this. I mean, a lot, maybe I'm a softie on this, but a lot of women talk about how lazy men are and how they're

not in tune. And I just think to talk to people, explain to people the kind of earworms that have been handed down to us, all of these traditions, assumptions about who likes what, who can do what. I call them earworms because they echo in our head and they've got to get in the way of building new melodies and new rhythms to work together. it may not always be that the men are intentionally not stepping up to the plate, but they and the whole way that society is organized means that they can't step up at the plate. Let me give you an example. It makes a lot of sense in a heterosexual marriage for the woman who bears the child to stay home in the early days. You know, it was quite a physical thing.

You may be nursing. And so it makes a lot of sense. And it doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to be that way forever. It doesn't necessarily mean that you're going to not be able to continue your work. But the longer it goes on, the more tempting it is for people to see the mother as the one who is the person in charge of the child. And if the man is out of the home, even with the best intentions, he doesn't understand just how much work and how urgently that work has to be done. So you begin to get into this pattern that may not be at all conscious on either people's part. But if you don't actually say, no, this is something that will happen to us, given the way our work is organized and the way child care works in society, we have to

actively fight against this happening. And that takes a lot of thought. If I heard you right, you said that many single women fear that in marriage, men would take a back seat when it comes to housework and child rearing. And I want to explore that a little deeper in just a moment because I think or I thought that that had changed. We're discussing the state of and the future of marriage with Stephanie Kuntz. She's Director of Research in Public Education for the Council on Contemporary Families and author of the book, For Better and Worse, The Complicated Past and Challenging Future of Marriage.

So, Stephanie, I want to explore more about this idea that women are concerned that men will leave most of the housework and the child-rearing chores to women. Is that still the case? Because it seems like that that has changed somewhat in the last 50 years, 60 years, yes? The usual claim about men is that they often say, well, I'd like to do this, but I need teaching, you know, learned helplessness. But, you know, we women also have a learned helpfulness. We, you know, get to be the experts in the early days of child rearing. And sometimes we think that everybody should do it our way. You know, it's called gatekeeping.

You know, Mike, I've talked about this problem for years. And yet, just last a couple years ago when my grandson started, fairly newborn grandson started crying in the other room with my husband was there. I swooped into the room, took the baby out of his arms, you know, and he just looked at me with his jaw open, like, what's wrong with you? What kind of feminist are you? That you wouldn't trust me to hold the baby? And I said, oh.

So, you know, I sometimes reload the dishwasher. So we're trying to do something that has not been done before, and we have to get out of the habits and assumptions and the ways that society is organized, that encourage men not to notice the little things that need doing, not to plan for them, not to do the emotional and planning work of family life, and that keep being earworms in women and making them do that, even when they need to maybe walk away and let the man do it as best he can

until he learns to do it. But it's not just necessarily until he learns to do it. And you just said a moment ago that you felt compelled to take the baby from your husband as if he didn't know how to do it. And then you also said you sometimes reload the dishwasher. And I infer from that that your husband loaded the dishwasher and you felt compelled to somehow fix that. That somehow the way he loaded it, the dishes wouldn't have gotten clean. And so it isn't just a matter of men learning to do it, but it's also about women learning that men don't always do it their way or maybe up to the same standard. And that's important.

Well, yes, it is. I'm fortunate to have grown up so that I really don't care if the bed gets made every day. My husband does care, so he makes it. but it is also true that we need to have a little kind of negotiation about that. I think that there's a book called Fair Play that Haley Swenson from the Better Life Lab, who wrote a wonderful afterward for my book, talks about in her little piece, about how you have to divide up the chores or redistribute them in ways that the person doing it takes full responsibility for all of that chore,

and you have to decide on the minimum standards for those doors. So that's a negotiation process. What are the minimum standards for cleaning up after dinner? If someone wants to go further than the minimum standards, fine. They can't pretend that you need to do that too. If they want to do less, however, you did have an agreement and you got to live up to that. So that's that important part of negotiation. I mean, I'll just use my own marriage as an example.

I really don't care if the bed gets made, but I am an avid cook, and I spend lots and lots of time on cooking and cooking preparation. And there was a period when I felt kind of resentful that my husband didn't come in and when I was cooking like a major meal that he didn't care about having and help along and do the grunt work for me. And then I realized, you can't do that. If he doesn't care and he doesn't want that, you're doing this mostly to give pleasure to yourself. You can't just assign the grunt work to him. If you're going to get pleasure out of this meal, you have to be able to say, I can do the grunt work as well as the fun, fancy stuff and flame it at the end and get all the applause for it. So that's the kind of self-examination both partners need to do and the kind of negotiation and compromise they need to do. when they're talking about chores.

One thing that same-sex couples can really teach heterosexual couples is they don't have the same sort of expectation that one part because he's a boy and one because she's a girl have certain kind of skills or interests. So they tend to divide chores much more thoughtfully. You know what statistic I would love to hear and I don't know if anyone's ever done this, But people talk about and you've talked about those who think they will get married or they won't get married or they want to get married or they don't want to get married.

But I wonder towards the end of a person's life, someone who did or maybe didn't get married, was there a regret? There's a lot of debate about that. And it depends what the reasons for your choice. But there's actually very solid research that shows that people who choose not to get married because they want to not because they've been rejected over and over again or the kind of person that don't have friends. Those people tend to build very wide friendship networks, wider than most married couples. And to the extent that they have done that, that's what counts.

And in fact, I quote research in the book that it's really by the time you get into old age, it's your friendship networks even more than your marriage partner that decides how you're doing. A good marriage partner will help you sustain good friendship networks. But many times couples fall into this kind of isolating thing that can be quite bad for them because they are not reaching out and getting that feedback and revitalization from people with new ideas and different things to do. So wrap this up and just based on all the research you've done, what do you think of marriage today and maybe looking off into the future? I don't think that marriage is dead.

Most people do continue to marry, though at much older ages, two-thirds of people who divorce go on and marry again. But what we have to understand and what so many of the family values promoting, and the ones who are having hysteria about all the choices that are left, forget. Marriage at this point is never again going to be the main institution that organizes people's lives, that society can count on to say, oh, I know what you are doing and what you need. It's not going to be the main institution in which all people's major life decisions are made or their major personal responsibilities are carried out. So we have to adjust our thinking to a way of supporting marriage's partnerships

and recognizing that people will live longer lives outside of marriage and incur important social and personal obligations outside of marriage. And maybe we need to take responsibility and start thinking about how we serve all our people's needs, whether they're married or not. You know, it's easy to view marriage through your own personal lens and assume that that's how it is in the world. But clearly there's a lot of different ways marriage does and doesn't work, and I appreciate you exploring that with some real research. Stephanie Kuntz has been my guest.

She's Director of Research and Public Education for the Council on Contemporary Families and author of the book, For Better and Worse, the complicated past and challenging future of marriage. And there's a link to her book in the show notes. Stephanie, thank you for being here. All right. Thanks so much, Mike. There are people who seem to have an almost unshakable belief in themselves. They walk into a job interview or give a presentation,

compete in a sporting event, or face some other challenge, and somehow they just seem certain they can handle it. Most of us look at those people and assume they must have been born that way. But according to my guest, confidence isn't something you're born with, it's something you build. And there are specific ways to strengthen it and make it more reliable when you need it most. Dr. Nate Zinser has spent decades teaching soldiers, athletes, executives, and first responders how to develop confidence and mental toughness under pressure. He's director of the Performance Psychology Program at the United States Military Academy at West Point

and has consulted with the FBI Academy, U.S. Army Recruiting Command, and the New York City Fire Department. He's author of a book called The Confident Mind, a battle-tested Guide to Unshakeable Performance. Hey, Nate, welcome to something you should know. Hello, Mike. What a delight it is to be on with you. So I don't know if it's human nature or what? but I think it's a very common experience for people to, if they have something to do, something important, the outcome matters, that one of the first things they do is think, what could go wrong? How do I keep it from going wrong? That the focus is on what could go wrong,

and I think people do that. I know I've done that many times. So I want to get your thoughts on that. Here are my thoughts. I'll start out with the very first thing that you mentioned. We're about to do something that has a certain degree of importance. And our default seems like it's, okay, what could go wrong? How can I prevent it from going wrong? We have this almost characteristic habit of anticipating difficulty. This is a very human thing to do. This is a certain degree of biology for us, Mike. We have lived on this planet as human beings for hundreds of thousands of years. Under somewhat precarious survival circumstances, our primitive ancestors, we're constantly looking over their shoulder. Where's the fresh water? Where are the tracks that will lead us to something that we can eat?

So to a certain extent, imagine in what could go wrong and what are the difficulties and what do I have to be careful about? In a way, that's been wired into us biologically. Now, on the other hand, and this is the good news, we are also to a degree biologically wired to have a streak of optimism. We will find the pure water. We will find the tracks that will lead us to the prey. A degree of optimism is also part of the human condition. So rather than thinking about, or maybe not rather, but in addition to thinking about what might go wrong, thinking about I have what it takes to make it go right. I have, indeed, I have some capabilities. There are possibilities, but rather than just telling yourself, oh, I've got it, I've got it locked up,

I can do fine, everything's great. No, I think you have. have to be a little more systematic about that and be able to take whatever time and energy is required to look back into your past and say, okay, I have accomplished this task, which is somewhat related to the task before me now. I accomplished this other task. I have to be able to look back into my personal history and just like an attorney in a trial, come up with evidence that supports the conviction, yeah, I can do it. To simply tell yourself, yeah, I can do it, yeah, I can do it, yeah, I can do it, without a sense of some underlying rationale, that's not particularly effective.

But if I've done a good job reflecting on my previous experience, creating a sort of psychological bank account of constructive memories, etc., then I can approach this new, somewhat challenging, important situation with a sense of, okay, I've got reasons to believe in myself. And what is the best mechanism for doing that? Because you could think of things that you've done in the past that were great, and there are thoughts that come in your head and then they disappear, and then you're back to thinking what could go wrong again. So what's the format for doing this so that it sticks? I think the format is being somewhat formal about it. I encourage all of my clients to do a fairly deep dive into their professional past and come up with a list of their top 10 moments of performance,

those top 10 moments in your career, and then be equally formal day by day by day reflecting for five minutes. That's all it takes. Five minutes on your day. What little things did I get right? If you're formal in that discussion with yourself, you're kind of creating a larger, larger psychological bank account. A lot of what you talk about and a lot of the work that you do is with athletes.

And I think what you're talking about seems to be more accepted in the sports world in terms of individual performance, team play, that kind of thing. Less so in the non-sports world where people think that, well, I think they've, I don't know what they think, but it's less accepted that that's not the way to do it. Maybe it is to improve your sprint time, but that's not the way to do it at the office. Well, it's funny that you mention that, Mike, because 30 years ago, it wasn't well accepted as a practice to improve, as you put it, your 100-yard sprint time. When I began work with Eli Manning in 2007, we had to keep it quiet. There are very few people in the New York giant pro football organization who knew that I was advising this rising star in these kinds of cognitive skills. But in the last 20 years, there's been an explosion, especially in the competitive sports world, in applied sports psychology. So there's been a dramatic increase of acceptance of this kind of practice.

in that world. To your question, though, is it less acceptable in the business world? That is rapidly changing, even as we speak. I have dozens of clients who are venture capitalist, sales managers, VPs of engineering, and the very same process is extremely valuable to these people in their, I called them white collar athletes.

mentions some of the people that you have worked with. Certainly. I spent 12 seasons mentoring Eli Manning of the New York Giants. I spent 12 seasons mentoring various members of the Philadelphia Flyers Hockey Program. I am currently mentoring celebrity chefs, orthopedic surgeons, ophthalmologic surgeons, other professional football players, hockey players, basketball players. The list is very, very broad. And some of these people have been working with me for years and years,

just to maintain that competitive edge, to maintain that little bit of confidence and ease of being that often spells the difference between smashing success and an also-run performance. Well, it is the title of your book, and we haven't really talked about the word confidence. We've been talking about, you know, getting better at something or not sabotaging yourself. But where's the confidence? What are we trying to do with that?

We're trying to establish a sense of certainty about our various abilities so that we can perform those tasks. We can execute those skills. we can show what we are able to do with a absolute minimum of self-consciousness, fear, doubt, worry. The idea is to cultivate a sense of certainty about your ability that allows you to sort of bypass or ignore a lot of conscious, discursive, analytical thought, and simply execute almost unconsciously. I have yet to meet someone who says that in the moments when I know I was absolutely at my best, there was this paradoxical sense of ease and energy.

I didn't have to think about my next step. It kind of just happened. And I was almost a passive witness to something, yet I was completely, completely engaged. So there's this wonderful paradox about being absolutely certain to the point where you are almost unconscious about what you're doing when you're doing it. There is a point, and you write about this, and I found this particularly helpful for me, is that you get to a point where you have to stop trying, that when it's time to, when it's time to perform, when it's time to go run your sprints, whatever it is, you stop the analyzing and you just do it.

And I think that's so hard for people to stop saying, what's wrong now? What could go wrong now? It's just so hard to turn that off. It can indeed might be a challenge to turn that off, which is why when, again, we'll just, we'll use the sprint. analogy, if you're a high school or a college sprinter, well, you better practice, turn it off in practice so that you will have had the experience of doing it before you arrive at a competition before you attempt to do so in a track meet.

Yes, by all means, be somewhat analytical. and judgmental and even self-critical in practice for part of the practice. But you better also practice stepping up to the starting line, kicking yourself back into those spinter blocks, taking your ready position with the thought, I'm just going to burn this up. I'm going to see how good I am. let's see how fast I can be. And you approach several repetitions in practice with that, let's just see what I got.

Let's just see what I got. Let's just see what I got. And by doing so, you give yourself practice and rehearsal in trusting the level of fitness and skill and competence that you have. and that's what you get to rely on when it's time to perform in a competition or a meet or a important discussion in the workplace. So there's a point that people hit sometimes, and maybe a good analogy or a good example of this is like in a tennis match, where you're playing tennis and you miss a shot that you should have

gotten and you can't let it go. You just beat yourself up and it screws up your play for the rest of the game. and it's really hard not to do that for a lot of people, but you'll notice that the real great tennis players don't do that. They move on and they don't sit and pout about the shot they missed. And it's hard to do. It's hard to do because they practice that, okay? In a most revealing interview a couple of years ago,

Novak Djokovic arguably, the greatest tennis player of all time stunned the 60 Minutes interviewer when he said, no, no, no, no, no, my mental strength is not a gift. It's something that I work on. And the interviewer said, you mean you work on it? Like you work on your serve and your forehand? And Djokovic said, yes, absolutely. Jokovic and the other great players take significant pride in being able to acknowledge a mistake, feel a little bit pissed off about it for less than five seconds, and then they reset themselves and they go on.

And that is a skill that they practice so that when they are playing at the U.S. Open or playing in Wimbledon, they have had the U.S. experience of acknowledging a goof, even a significant goof, taking a breath and then resetting themselves. And there are as many different ways to reset oneself as there are human beings on the planet. You just have to be willing to do the work to establish for yourself a proper resetting sequence. One, two, three, now I'm back. Everybody's got to be able to be able to be a proper resetting sequence. one, two, three, now I'm back. Everybody's got to be able.

Everybody can do that if you're willing to put the work in and do this kind of self-reflection and admission and examination of your own mental habits. If you're willing to do that, then you can cultivate considerable mental strength, the likes of which we see from the Novak Djokovic's of the world. It is, I think, very hard for, people to imagine. If you're someone who tends to dwell on your mistakes or worry about what's

going to go wrong, to hear that there are people who can just say, let's see what I got, let me go for it and not think about the negative. But boy, those are two very different ways to approach anything. And clearly one is better than the other, it would seem. Yes, you're quite correct. clearly one is more effective. We have to face the reality that much of our social conditioning, much of the messaging that we are subject to in elementary school and middle school, much of that messaging is be careful, think about your mistakes, always be questioning yourself. And it almost encourages this overall vibe, this overall sense of oneself that I'm never good enough.

And we've got to be careful about that kind of socialization. Yeah, that is so valuable. You know, speaking for myself, I mean, I was raised that way. I mean, you know, fit in, don't make waves, watch yourself, learn from your mistakes, rather than, as you write about in your book, like Dion Sanders, who is so not that. He's so... He's so not that indeed.

And when he comes across as this outspoken, really enthusiastic, uber-confident individual, a lot of people listen to him and go, oh, my God, this guy's crazy. But if you ask Dion and you go a little deeper, you'll realize that he reserves this uber-confident attitude for when he's on. the playing field. But he is a careful, somewhat respectful, somewhat modest gentleman off the field.

He's a great example of some of the attitudes and thought processes that are very, very useful for folks in this day and age. But they are, as you point out, Mike, a little bit unusual. Well, anyone who's looking for some more confidence, some more certainty in their ability could certainly benefit from your advice today. I've been talking with Dr. Nate Zinser. He is director of the Performance Psychology Program at the United States Military Academy at West Point, and he's author of the book, The Confident Mind,

a battle-tested Guide to Unshakeable Performance. And there's a link to his book in the show notes. Nate, thanks for sharing this. It was a delight working with you, Mike. I look forward to the release of this podcast, and my best wishes to all your listeners. Most dog owners think they're pretty good at reading their pets' emotions, but research suggests we're often wrong,

especially when we think a dog is enjoying something that it is actually just tolerating. A good example is hugging. Humans love hugs because they signal affection and closeness. Dogs don't see it that way. Animal behavior experts point out that when dogs feel, their natural instinct is to often move away or run away. A hug takes that option away, which may increase the dog's stress and anxiety and could even lead

to a dog bite. In one study examining hundreds of online photos of people hugging their dogs, researchers found that most of the dogs displayed at least one sign of discomfort. Things like turning their head away, showing the whites of their eyes, flattening their ears, or licking their lips. Yet the people in the photo almost always believe their dog was happy.

The lesson isn't that your dog doesn't love you, it's that dogs express affection differently than humans do. A scratch behind the ears, a belly rub, a game of fetch, or simply sitting beside you may be much more appreciated

than a big bear hug. And that is something you should know. Our podcast is produced by Jeff Havison, Jennifer Brennan, executive producer is Ken Williams. I'm Mike Carruthers. Thanks for listening today to something you should know. Are you one of those media strategy people clicking through slides, scrolling spreadsheets?

Yes? Good. This is for you. Because on Spotify, there's an audience that's different. Locked in. Loyal, invested. They're called fans. Fans don't just listen to music. They feel seen by it, like it belongs to them. So when your brand shows up on Spotify, that's who you're talking to. And you're right next to artists like me, Lizzo. So, are you ready to talk to fans? Spotify Advertising. You're among fans.